Place, Organization, Democracy: Three Strategies For Municipal Branding

Abstract

We develop a typology for analysing branding processes in municipalities: a place, organizational and democracy branding strategy. Our main contribution is to expand the view of municipalities as places, taking the debate on the branding of cities, regions and municipalities in a more nuanced direction. Our findings show that the place branding perspective is insufficient for understanding branding efforts; in fact, organizational branding is the most prevalent strategy. However, democracy branding is also strongly present. Using logistic regression, we conclude that the place branding debate should be nuanced by what we know about municipal size, identity and perceived media influence.

Key words:

• Place branding
• local government branding
• reputation management
• municipality branding
• public sector marketing

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was carried out with funding from the Norwegian Research Council under the DEMOSREG programme (project number 209870). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. We also thank Marcus Buck, Tor Midtbø and Kjell Arne Røvik for comments on a previous version of this article. Some of the data used in this paper is retrieved from the municipal database created by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). NSD is not responsible for the analysis or the interpretations undertaken in this study.

Notes

1 We thank Reviewer 1 for directing our attention to the ‘locality branding’ term.

2 Although services could be included in the core brand characteristics of the democracy strategy, we have chosen to include this dimension in the organizational strategy. The reason is that product and service quality is a key dimension in most scales used to measure the reputation of organizations (e.g. Fombrun and van Riel 2004).

3 We first conducted a multinomial logistic regression using the dependent variable with all three categories intact (place, organization, democracy). However, because of too few units in the democracy category, SPSS could not complete the calculation. We tried multiple approaches to solve this problem, without having to merge any of the categories on the dependent variable, none of which were successful. As a result, we proceeded with a binominal logistic regression with the democracy category excluded.