The application of marketing techniques and the adoption of a marketing
philosophy in order to meet operational and strategic goals of places
have been well established both in practice and in theory. The rapid rise
in popularity of place marketing over the past decade, to the extent that
it has become an acceptable and commonplace activity of place management,
may give the impression that this is a recent phenomenon. It is not.
Places have long felt a need to diff erentiate themselves from each other
in order to assert their individuality and distinctive characteristics in
pursuit of various economic, political or socio- psychological objectives.
The conscious attempt of governments to shape a specifi cally designed
place identity and promote it to identifi ed markets, whether external or
internal, is almost as old as government itself. The phenomenon of places
transferring marketing knowledge to their own operational needs is not
as novel as one might think. As Ashworth and Voogd (1994:39) describe:
‘since Leif Ericson sought new settlers in the 8th century for his newly