I spoke at Serbia’s Brand Fair in June 2011, and a week before heading to Belgrade, I did an advance interview with a local magazine. Quite possibly it’s in Serbian somewhere, but if English is your tongue, here’s the interview in full. Could you in brief explain the difference between branding and advertising? The brand [...]

Cultural Place Making is new creative collaboration between Jane Wentworth Associates (who specialises in developing brands and identities for cultural organisations) and WhereBrands (a pre-eminent place branding consultancy). We work with clients who have both an arts/culture angle and a place aspect: marketplaces, museums, opera houses, festivals, arts quarters, neighbourhoods and even whole cities (particularly [...]

In my ongoing study of urbanisation, I’ve been browsing a doorstopper of a book called The Endless City, put together by LSE’s Urban Age Project and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society (who?) and published by Phaidon. Saskia Sassen, in an essay called “Seeing like a City,” puts urbanisation/globalisation in Web 2.0 terms that bear (and [...]

This is an insight-filled overview of place branding written by WhereBrands founder Jeremy Hildreth. Published in the quarterly academic journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, it succinctly and very readably lays out our ideas regarding the rights and wrongs and dos and don’ts place branding. The abstract explains: Editor Simon Anholt asked Jeremy Hildreth for his [...]

It’s easy to get caught up in place branding rhetoric and lost in logos and forget that a symbol is meant to symbolize. Which is why I liked Perm, Russia’s Cyrillic “P” identifier, affectionately known as “Big Red.” Perm — a Russian top-10 city (pop. 1 million) with feasible ambitions to become a national cultural [...]

The working title of this post was “On the folly of rewarding B while hoping for A.” That’s the name of an article we read during my MBA studies at Oxford. It leapt to mind as a realization dawned on me: most place branding “initiatives” don’t reward B, let alone A, and hardly ever hope [...]

My copy of Ogilvy on Advertising sits on a shelf miles from here. I wanted to re-read the section on advertising tourism for Jamaica, as that might be the closest this genius of promotion came to weighing in on nation branding. I found, however, a student’s book report which summarizes Ogilvy’s tips on tourism advertising: [...]

Just as a writer bears ultimate responsibility for being understood, “If you’re a place, it’s up to you to present yourself legibly,” to make sure people can get your story. This is some of the advice I give in a casual but insightful essay that Thinkingplace have published in their quarterly. I use examples from [...]

1) This mockumentary satire ad for the ski resort of Åre should make you laugh. A representative of Visit Sweden showed it as part of her presentation to the Swedish Lapland Tourismforum, at which I spoke also. I’d seen it before, but it reminded me that humour — unforced, of course, as a natural expression [...]

The five-ring circus of the Olympic selection process for 2016 is over. In my view, the right guys won. And brand image (along with the fact that Rio had the map) had everything to do with it.

“The Cabinet War Rooms, especially the bedrooms, evoke a period of deprivation and duty.” That’s what Lonely Planet says about one of London’s top tourist attractions. I want to emphasize the word “evoke”. Whenever you’re creating a tourist attraction, the key word, it seems to me, is evoke. You want to be evoking. A lot. [...]

On 3 April 1964, Martin Luther King gave the famous ‘mountaintop speech’: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop….And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get [...]