A Guide for Managers

Abstract

This quote from a CVB manager expresses the difficulties many professional place brand managers have with defining, refining, deploying, and evaluating a strategic place brand program. Despite challenges, place branding and its associated practices are taking place in public and non-profit organizations, hence, it becomes incumbent upon scholars to understand the rationale, challenges, and implications, while practitioners need tools to improve existing branding processes or begin fresh strategies to create and leverage a distinct brand identity and ethos. While the former part of this book relied heavily upon theoretical constructs, this chapter is dedicated to briefly giving practitioners a strategic process for place brand development, implementation, and evaluation.

I can pull up on my laptop right here at my desk and … look at two different sized ads on two different websites that are trying to reach that millennial market, and view the number of clicks … You can tell the wording that works better, and which online venue is reaching the target market faster, and you can adjust your marketing dollars how that’s done … So those types of measurements and the way things have changed, it’s so much different than it was just a few years ago. How do you adapt to that?

— Executive Director, Southern CVB