This primer demystifies branding, demonstrates how to reveal a destination brand, and provides real world examples, as well as affordable, proven tools, templates and checklists to help breathe life into a small city brand.

Usually, a country brand is not focused, resulting in unsuccessful place branding. It is possible to successfully raise your national identity to the level of an attractive brand. Building a country brand is an investment, with strong positive returns. This book will guide you along the path to building a successful brand.

The practice of city branding is being adopted by increasing numbers of city authorities around the world and it is having a direct impact on public and private sector practice. The author captures this emerging phenomenon in a way that blends a solid theoretical and conceptual underpinning together with relevant real life cases.

Since the 1990s, city branding has become a key factor in urban development policies. Cities all over the world take specific actions to manipulate the imagery and the perceptions of places, both in the eyes of the inhabitants and in those of potential tourists, investors, users and consumers. City Branding: The Ghostly Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities explores different sides of place branding policies. The construction and the manipulation of urban images triggers a complex politics of representation, modifying the visibility and the invisibility of spaces, subjects, problems and discourses. In this sense, urban branding is not an innocent tool; this book aims to investigate and reflect on the ideas of urban life, the political unconscious, the affective geographies and the imaginaries of power constructed and reproduced through urban branding. This book situates city branding within different geographical contexts and ‘ordinary’ cities, demonstrated through a number of international case studies. In order to map and contextualise the variety of urban imaginaries involved, author Alberto Vanolo incorporates conceptual tools from cultural studies and the embrace of an explicitly post-colonial perspective. This critical analysis of current place branding strategy is an essential reference for the study of city marketing.

Place branding has made it possible for international destinations to be able to compete within the global economy. Through the promotion of different cities, natural beauty, and local culture or heritage, many regions have been able to increase their revenue and international appeal by attracting tourists and investments. Global Place Branding Campaigns across Cities, Regions, and Nations provides international insights into marketing strategies and techniques being employed to promote global tourism, competitiveness, and exploration. Featuring case studies and emergent research on place branding, as well as issues and challenges faced by destinations around the world, this book is ideally suited for professionals, researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and students.

Cultural analysts, social scientists, and media scholars explore the ways in which cities generate competing visions of their use and their future, thereby branding their image for international consumption.

This interdisciplinary book details the economic, cultural and social background of the development of Chinese mega-cities, as well as presenting the mechanisms of governance and urban growth strategies. Therein, the main discussion centres on the cont