Small City Branding Around the World

Change Management is at the Heart of Successful Place Branding

A place brand often requires changes to regulations, laws, systems, budgets, processes, resources, and recruitmen

Why Isn't Anyone Supporting our City Brand?

The brand strategy must function as a guidance system to unify stakeholders behind  one brand idea, one voice, one look.

Confront Reality if You Want a Better City Image

Successful place branding is the result of winning small victories, again and again to build a reality that exceeds your brand promise.

Australia's Barrington Coast Name Draws Controversy

July 27, 2018

A new destination name, Barrington Coast”, is proposed for the Mid North Coast in the Australian State of New South Wales. Unfortunately, it’s stalled and now mired controversy.

Free e-Books on Destination Branding for Tourism Cities

A series of free e-books tackles branding issues facing destination management organization (DMO) and tourism leaders in tourism cities

What's the Best Time for City Wayfinding?

A city's branded wayfinding system should follow the city’s brand strategy, not the other way around. 

Book 10: Experiences are the Brand

A free eBook explaining the importance of tourism experience design and delivery to a city’s destination brand

Book #9: How to Bring Your City's Brand to Life

This free PDF e-book covers how to deploy a place brand through community engagement, marketing communications and experience design

e-Book #8: The Keys to Winning City Taglines

This eBook tackles how creating taglines and logos can be either a great window into the brand or a controversial lightning rod.

eBook 7: Keys to Successful City Logo Design

This e-book provides ideas and checklists for designing a city or tourism destination logo to support a place branding strategy.

eBook 6: How to Discover Your City's Most Potent Brand

The basics for starting a community branding process, including research, tourism assessment, creating brand platform and place brand strategy. 

eBook 5: How to Start Your Community Branding Project

Successful place branding is based on community-wide collaboration to capture the insights needed to reveal the strongest brand identity possible.

eBook #4: Is Your City Ready for a Brand Journey?

This free PDF eBook covers the actions needed to prepare for the support, understanding and endorsement of a community branding process.

A Toolkit for Successful Community Branding

A series tackles the issues for launching and managing a community branding initiative. Each e-book tackles a different topic related to the challenges of branding places.

eBook 3: Place Branding is Strategic and Long-term

February 22, 2018

Place branding provides a strategic framework to guide how the place can communicate, prioritize, and behave for target audiences in order to stand out and deliver value.

eBook 2: Why Bother With Small City Branding?

The second in a series of free PDF e-Books about the benefits of place branding for cities and destinations.

Free e-Book Series on Small City Branding Released

A free eBook simplifies starting and managing a community branding project. It provides the basics on assessment, positioning, strategy and logo design

Successful Destination Brands Need Some Tension

Trying to define brand positioning for a city that everyone in the community is going to like is a sure-fire path to revealing a bland and meaningless brand. On the other hand, standing for something distinctive and meaningful will probably require a degree of sacrifice by some constituents.

Is There a Cure for Slogan Envy?

I’d love to have a dollar for every time I have heard a line like, “what we need is a slogan like ‘I Love NY’ or ‘Virginia is for Lovers”. Well, it happened again last week when I received a call from the mayor of a community in Virginia.

What's the Difference Between Branding and Marketing?

Why are some people confused about the difference between branding and marketing a city.