Contents
City branding is usually discussed as if it were a design job: a logo, a slogan in three languages, a campaign plan full of impressions and reach. I have sat through enough of those presentations to know how pleasant they are to look at, and how little they change on their own. City branding is really the work of deciding why someone should choose one city over another and then making that reason true and visible for years, and the longer I work where events, tourism and cities meet, the more convinced I am that the brand is decided in what people actually do in a city and in what they say about it once they are back home. Events are one of the very few tools that work on both at once.
Why does a new logo change so little?
A logo is the visible end of a decision, and most of the time the decision has not been made. The decision is about the reason someone should pick this city, and that reason comes first and is the hardest part.
Most cities don’t suffer from having nothing to say. They suffer from having too much. History, a cuisine, a coastline or a highland nearby, crafts, a university, a football club, a famous dessert. Put all of it on one page with the same weight and you get a description that is perfectly accurate and could belong to a hundred other places.
So the real question is who the city wants to attract, and for what. Congress organizers? Families from the big cities on a long weekend? Football teams looking for a winter base? Students choosing a university? Each of these groups picks a city for different reasons, and a brand that speaks to all of them at once usually speaks to none of them clearly. Even the adjectives change meaning by audience. To a congress organizer, “innovative” means research institutions and specialists you can actually meet; to a weekend visitor it means something closer to a lively design scene, so the same word needs different proof for each.
In my view, this is the step agencies skip most often. A choice is not a deliverable you can put on the final slide, and it is uncomfortable, because choosing means agreeing on what the city will not lead with. Much of what gets sold as place branding stops at a new visual identity, which is much easier to approve. It just doesn’t do the work that the choice was supposed to do.
Where is a city’s reputation actually formed?
Not in the promotional film, however beautiful it is. Your relationship with a city begins when you arrive.
How easy it is to get from the airport or the coach station to the centre, whether the public transport makes sense to a stranger, what happens in the taxi, whether the signs help, how the streets feel after dark, whether there is somewhere to sit with a tea without being hurried, whether the urban park near the hotel is a place you would cross in the evening. Nothing on that list is advertising, all of it belongs to what makes cities livable, and it shapes your opinion more than the advertising does.
Let me be honest about a risk that rarely makes it into the campaign plan. Good communication can make things worse. If the campaign promises far more than the street delivers, visitors arrive with expectations the city cannot meet, and the gap between that promise and the visitor experience becomes the story they tell. Our industry sees the same thing with events every season: an overpromised program is judged much more harshly than a modest one delivered well.
So I count hotels, DMCs, guides, transfer companies and the local trade as part of city branding, whether or not they think of themselves that way. The receptionist who explains the neighbourhood, the driver who greets the guest by name, the shopkeeper who gives a foreigner the same price as a local are writing the city’s brand every day, one visitor at a time, and no agency brief ever reaches them.
What does an event give a city that a campaign cannot?
A date.
A city’s history, museums or food can give someone a reason to visit, but that reason has no deadline. “I should see that city one day” is a pleasant thought that rarely turns into a booking. An event changes the sentence into “I need to be there that week,” and that shift from someday to a specific week is, to my mind, the greatest gift an event can make to a destination.
A congress, a festival, a tournament or a well-run cultural season hands people a concrete reason to come at a concrete time. Placed well, it fills hotels in weeks when they would otherwise be half empty, brings a different kind of visitor and, over the years, changes how the city is talked about abroad. It also gives the visitor an experience while they are there, which a campaign never can.
The Antalya coast shows this well, even if nobody there would call it branding. The football teams that come for winter camps (many of them from European leagues) have made the region known for something besides summer beaches, much as training camps have done for parts of the Iberian coast. That reputation was built by hotels, training facilities and camp organizers doing the same job well, season after season, and it would not have come from a slogan.
What a city repeatedly hosts, and how well it hosts it, ends up telling people more about that city than anything the city says about itself.
Does a busier calendar make a stronger brand?
It would be convenient if it did. It doesn’t.
A city can host hundreds of events a year and still be remembered for none of them, and a single mega event cannot carry a brand on its own either. What matters is whether some of those events build a real bond with the place: whether they keep the same dates, grow slowly, involve the city’s own people and businesses, and could not easily be picked up and moved somewhere else. The OECD’s toolkit on global events comes at this from the policy side, asking hosts to plan the long term local benefits before the event is delivered rather than to look for them once the stage is gone. Small community events that only make sense in one neighbourhood often pass that test better than the big stage does.
Our own industry, organization companies like mine included, could be harder on itself here. Too many festivals are assembled from the same package: a stage on a truck, a headline singer, the food stands that tour the region all summer, the sponsor banners along the fence. It works for one night. It also could be anywhere. An event that could be dropped into another city without anyone noticing the difference gives the city a good evening and very little else.
When a client brings us an event that carries a city’s name, I try to get one question on the table early: what does this event do for the city? Does it bring people who would not otherwise come? Does it fill a quiet month? Does it give the city a theme it can own for years? If none of the answers is clear, it may still be a fine event, but it is not doing branding work, and the final report should not pretend otherwise.
Which numbers are worth a city’s attention?
City marketing loves the numbers that are easy to collect: arrivals, reach on social channels, how many events were held, the number of news stories. They are useful indicators and, on their own, they say surprisingly little.
Reach tells you how many people saw the city’s name. It does not tell you whether a single one of them now connects the city with what it wanted to be known for, and that connection is the whole point of the exercise. The more telling figures are harder to gather, and these are the ones I would want on the table before any reach figure:
- how long visitors stay, and whether that changes over the years;
- where their spending goes, the same three streets or the wider centre;
- whether they come back, and whether they recommend the city to someone else;
- how the flow of visitors feels to the people who live there, and whether they still find room for their own recreation and leisure on a busy weekend.
Cities do not have to invent these measures from scratch. Edinburgh’s festivals have kept a public shelf of audience and impact research for many years, and what strikes me there is less any single result than the habit of asking similar questions season after season, which is something no other city can copy by copying a festival format.
I would also widen who counts as a visitor, the way the idea of a visitor economy does. The doctor at a medical congress, the fan who travels for an away match, the family that comes for a wedding, the student who takes an overnight bus across the country for a concert. They all sleep somewhere, eat somewhere, take taxis and form opinions. The business events side of our field has long been in the habit of asking exactly who came and why, and city marketing could borrow that habit without spending anything.
Not every city needs more visitors, either. Some need to spread the ones they have across the year, some need them to stay one night longer, and some need the kind of recreation management that keeps the crowds they already get from wearing out the beaches and parks residents use. A brand measured only by “more” eventually runs into its own limits.
Congress cities are won on the site visit
When an international association decides where to hold its congress, it rarely decides from a brochure. The decision makers come on a site visit. They walk the venue, check the hotels, test the transfer from the airport, sit through a dinner and ask awkward questions about capacity and dates. What convinces them is how the people they meet behave: whether the venue team answers straight, whether the hotel sales manager actually holds the room block, whether the DMC can show a real run of show from a previous congress instead of a mood board.
On the organizer’s side, asking for proposals and laying destination and agency files next to each other, I saw the same pattern again and again. The cities that won were rarely the ones with the glossiest presentation. They were the ones where everyone involved, from the convention bureau to the smallest supplier, seemed to be telling the same story and could back it up with something on paper.
That is city branding at its most honest. The brand turns out to be the sum of many small promises kept by businesses that are not officially in charge of the brand at all, and communication’s job is to find what is genuinely strong in a city and make it easy to understand, not to invent a city that the next site visit will fail to find.
Before the next logo tender, it is worth sending someone through the airport, the taxi queue and the hotel lobby with a notebook.