Place Branding Key Steps to Developing Successful Strategies
By Ed Burghard
Place branding is a strategy used by an increasing number of cities, states, countries and regions to effectively position and market their locations in order to compete for capital investment dollars. However, too often place branding initiatives are little more than sales campaigns with limited sustainable impact.
The following tips will help ensure that you make the best use of your money when funding a place branding initiative.
Create a team of trusted advisers
Seek the guidance of marketing professionals to help cut through the jargon used by advertising agencies and place branding consultants. They can help ensure the recommended solution will deliver the results you expect for a reasonable price. One place to look for these experts is in the private companies represented on your board of directors. Even with minimal input, professional marketers can make a huge difference during the strategic phase of your place branding initiative.
Enroll business community thought leaders as ambassadors
Thought leaders in your business community can be the key in helping you garner support for your place branding initiative. Defining the right brand promise without having broad based buy-in will cause failure. Thought leaders often can help ensure your vocal influencers are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Focus on a few industries and do the job well
No industry or company wants to be left out of a place branding effort. In the short term, however, it is better to limit the playing field to gain a competitive share of promotional voice. Begin by targeting the industries that represent the majority of your location’s gross domestic product. A good resource to help define these industries is Moody’s database (www.economy.com). To ensure a balanced approach, select one or two emerging industries to add to your focused portfolio. This conscious and controlled speculation is prudent to managing your economic portfolio. Your budget and internal resources will guide your decision on how many industries to target.
Get to know industry experts in the business community
Once you’ve selected industries on which to focus your place branding efforts, you need to determine which assets in your area are key points of competitive difference. Industry experts can keep you current on emerging trends that will affect profitability and global competitiveness. They are outstanding sounding boards to evaluate campaign concepts.
Translate location assets into business benefits
There is an old saying in business: features tell, but benefits sell. You need to connect the dots for the capital investor and explain the business value of your location assets. Great branding copy states the benefit and uses features as reasons to believe the benefit can be realized. Your industry experts are an effective resource to help you understand why an asset is important to business performance in their industry.
Partner with other communities to be more competitive
Economic clusters are not limited by geographic boundaries. Often a manufacturer’s supply chain includes multiple communities and regions. When communities have an interdependent economy, the assets of the broader geography are important to consider. These assets can be leveraged to make a more compelling case than could be made by focusing on your community alone. And if there is true interdependence, a capital investment made anywhere within the economic cluster benefits everybody connected to it.
Provide adequate support for the project
Two truths about place branding are that it takes time and costs money. If you want to change people’s opinion about your location quickly, you need to be prepared to invest in a leadership share of the voice. If you have a limited budget, you need to be patient to see measurable results. This is a hard, but important, discussion to have with your community leaders. You need a sustainable effort at competitive levels to make a difference in the minds of capital investment decision makers.
Author: Ed Burghard is a marketing director for Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. He was named a Harley Procter Marketer in 1999, a competitive lifetime Procter & Gamble appointment.
Currently he serves as executive director for the Ohio Business Development Coalition, a non-profit organization that develops marketing strategies to support the Ohio Department of Development (www.ohiomeansbusiness.com). Burghard can be contacted at (614) 857-0900 or eburghard@mac.com
Place Branding 