Since the 1990s, place branding has become an everyday practice of global market life, being widely and enthusiastically adopted by countries, regions and cities across the world. The purpose of place branding is to identify what makes a place attractive to different forms of global financial and human capital (i.e. investors, tourists, skilled labour, and international students) and use marketing and brand management techniques to promote the competitive image of the place in the global marketplace. Advocates of place branding suggest that it contributes to improving the place’s visibility in an era of great competition between nations, regions and cities, which in turn helps generate revenues and, for nation-states, increase their political legitimacy in international decision-making.

While nation branding might appear as a benign way to learn more about food, landscapes and nightlife in foreign locations, it bears deep political implications and highlights how the global economy is produced and reproduced by seemingly superficial everyday practices. First, it contributes to the development of the politics of expertise, granting political authority (and financial resources) to the corporate sector, and especially branding consultancies. Second, it frames the global economy as a competitive space, which in turns create disciplinary incentives for many places to transform and adapt to the imperatives of global capitalism.

Branding in and beyond the corporate sphere: the emergence of place branding

Place branding is a response to the claim that foreign publics and market imperatives are determinant for 21^st century statecraft. National reputation and its relevance to policy-makers is not a recent question. International fairs were used by nation-states to showcase their cultural achievements and material power in the nineteenth century. After World War II, national reputations were of utmost importance on the international scene in the context of the Cold War cultural warfare.

But transformations in the corporate sector in the 1990s led to the framing of these questions in market-driven terms. Before the 1990s, companies had been using marketing, public relations and advertising in order to promote their products and services to global consumers, with the corporate brand working as a symbol of the products and services on offer. However, these promotional techniques were increasingly applied to corporate brands themselves, without a necessary association to the specific products and services produced by companies. Brands such as Levis or Nike, to use examples from the clothing sector, became the focus of marketing professionals who instead of using brands to promote material products, focused on promoting brands as symbols of corporations’ identities. As companies turned to selling lifestyles and identity markers to global consumers, branding was given an unprecedented attention in and beyond the corporate sector.

Another shift in the global political economy after the end of the Cold War contributed to the rise of place branding. The growth and global expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs) led governments and corporations to be more and more dependent on one another to generate wealth. Management and marketing consultants and scholars, among which Harvard Professor Michael Porter and Wally Olins, renowned British branding consultant and founder of Wolff Olins and Saffron Brand Consultants, argued that in order for capital accumulation to be sustained, nations had to become as competitive as companies were already thriving to be. In order to achieve national competitiveness and successfully generate national profits, national governments were urged to use knowledge from corporate management to govern more effectively.  The same imperative applied to regional and metropolitan governments as they sought to attract global capital.

Place branding was born out of these two shifts, and its practical manifestations mushroomed around the world: diverse marketing operations (creation of slogans, logos, and supporting material such as videos, booklets, business meetings, cultural events, and so forth) usually supervised by governmental or private-public ad hoc bodies.

The politics of expertise

By introducing corporate knowledge as a means to improve policy-making, place branding participates to the predominance of the politics of expertise. Presented as politically neutral actors endowed with technical knowledge, place branding experts are meant to supply public officials with the right knowledge about metropolitan, regional and national identities in global times. In the words of British nation branding inventor and consultant Simon Anholt, as providers of corporate knowledge, these consultants become legitimate actors in policy-making, ‘almost, in a sense, teaching governments how to govern more effectively’.

These consultants are predominantly based in London, the financial and intellectual centre of the place branding industry. This indicates that their position of experts is also derived from structural inequalities in the global geography of knowledge, wherein industrialized countries in the West appear as possessors of superior knowledge through which they exercise power over the non-West. In place branding campaigns, the West appears as a desirable model of development and the non-Western world remains the abnormal and the undesirable, to be transformed to look like the West while at the same time reifying a radical difference that can appeal to foreign audiences in search of exoticism.