Many places seem to have reaped considerable and measurable benefits from
the pursuit of branding policies. However in almost all cases branding alone
cannot be credited with the success. Most often branding has worked
successfully in situations where the place product was already improving but its
external image was lagging, being still composed of already outdated elements.
The task of branding was only to encourage the reappraisal of an obsolete or
non-existent image. Secondly branding, or indeed marketing as a whole, has
rarely operated in isolation in these cases. Most usually marketing policies
were only one, and often not the most important, element in a combination of
local instruments, including financial, educational and spatial planning
programmes. A cynical view might be that branding works only when all the
other conditions for success are already in place. In other words branding has
beneficial impacts in circumstances when progress would have been achieved,
sooner or later, in any event. Conversely branding, however many resources
are devoted to it and however skilfully it is conducted, will have little effect on its
own upon intractable economic or social problems. Thus branding may be good
for some places, but is not the universal panacea that we too often seem to
think it is.