3. THE PLACE OF PLACE BRANDING IN PLACE MANAGEMENT
Place branding as an instrument of place management recognises that place
products remain places with the distinct attributes that accrue to places, such as
spatial scale, spatial hierarchies, resulting scale shadowing, the inherent multiplicity
and vagueness of goals, product-user combinations and consumer
utilities. All these and more (as outlined in Ashworth and Voogd, 1990) make
places distinctive products and thus place branding a distinctive form of product
branding. However, all this is much easier to articulate than to operationalise in
management. Both traditional commercial products and place products exist
within brand hierarchies but product brand hierarchies are not the same as place
brand ones (Gilmore, 2002). All brands require continuous management but the
many and diverse place actors in place management render place brands much
less manageable by any single organisation.
The three sets of instruments described above can and usually are exemplified
by many success stories. However, the even larger number of failures
remains unpublicised. Many expensive spectacular buildings are more ‘white
elephants’ than ‘flagships’, many promoted personalities remain unappreciated
and countless festivals are held with minimal impacts upon local, let alone
outside, consciousness. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the historical
successes where new brands have been established or old ones dramatically
altered, then it is that there is no single simple path to success. One solitary
instrument acting alone is rarely successful and even a mix of the above instruments
needs implementation and support through many more conventional place
planning and management measures. In Dublin the three factors of the European
city of culture designation, the decision to renovate rather than demolish the
Temple Bar district and the economic and cultural changes in Irish society
interacted in a way that makes it all but impossible to separate cause from effect.
Often success seems to be attributable to little more than particular local
conditions at a moment in time, which prompted individuals to seize upon an
often unlikely and unpredictable set of fortuitous circumstances. Signature
buildings, personality associations and hallmark events then become the catalysts
triggering existing latent processes and making manifest trends and
conditions that already at least potentially existed. If these caveats can be
recognised and incorporated into the process then place branding becomes
a valid, necessary and highly effective form of place management.