Abstract
Place branding is seriously studied in various academic disciplines. Its impact on strategic development plays a vital role in processes of sustainable urban transformation. Place branding originated in tourism management and over time its research focus spilled over and evolved in environmental science, urban studies and public administration. Scholars and policy makers are currently faced with a myriad of concepts in place branding research, which show considerable overlap but should be carefully distinguished from each other. To increase our understanding of this body of research, this article observes a strong pattern of the concepts in use, in their references to location types (i.e., urban, city, destination, place) and broadcasting activities (branding, marketing, promotion). It builds on this observation by collecting studies from the Scopus database by location type and broadcasting activities (LT–BA) reference pairs and systematically analysing and reviewing these from 1980 to 2018. A total of 2665 articles and reviews were identified and analysed based on (1) occurrences per reference pair, (2) co-occurrences per reference pair, and (3) co-occurrences for each reference pair with other concepts. On that basis, the origin and evolution of the research field including multiple reference pairs in use is explored and described.
Highlights
In recent decades, global economic development and rapid urbanization have intensified the competition between countries, regions, and cities to attract public resources, policy support, a talented workforce, and private investment [1]
The following sub-sections summarize the results for the various analyses we conducted: the analysis of the occurrence and co-occurrence of the selected location type and broadcasting activities (LT–Broadcasting activities (BA)) reference pairs, and the co-occurrence of the Location types (LT)–BA reference pairs with other concepts
The ‘destination marketing’ reference pair is by far the most frequently used in place branding research, followed by ‘place branding’, ‘place marketing’, ‘city branding’ and ‘destination branding’
Summary
Global economic development and rapid urbanization have intensified the competition between countries, regions, and cities to attract public resources, policy support, a talented workforce, and private investment [1]. This phenomenon contributed to and stimulated the development of a discipline, which is currently known under the terms city branding or place branding. Sub-concepts such as regional branding, city branding, and to a less extent, town branding developed, each focusing on a different spatial scale [5]. State-of-the-art knowledge about place branding as a concept is still fragmented and poorly understood [6,7,8]
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