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Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and Experienced
Book · July 2009
DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-24559-4
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Book Review
Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and experienced, R. Govers, F. Go.
Palgrave MacMillan (2009)., ISBN: 978-0-230-23073-6
The paradox at the heart of place branding is that it has been quite recently, widely and often with a messianic verve, embraced by place management authorities world-wide as a panacea for a bewildering diversity of economic and social ailments yet it lacks at present any intellectual grounding or even positioning within place planning and policy making. Practice is all around us in abun- dance but theory is scarce. We have countless answers, drawn from case studies, to the technical question of how to do it but next to no response to the more profound and ultimately essential questions of why, when and where. For this reason alone this book is to be welcomed, being, as far as I am aware, thefirst serious and sus- tained attempt to root the burgeoning practice in the wider context of ideas. That it is written by two justly well-regarded academics with long experience in the study of tourism destination manage- ment bodes well for satisfying this pressing need.
The introduction is a very wide and far-ranging discussion of image and reality as envisaged in modernity. In contradiction to the idea of recentness, the authors trace a history of place branding back not only to its parent discipline of product marketing but, unexpectedly, further back to a development of philosophical ideas as distant as Descartes. Indeed the discussion is so far ranging that some readers may feel impatience that the fundamental definitions of place branding are delayed until well into the book and then are rather narrowly conceived [p.19]. It is unfortunate that the distinc- tion between marketing and branding is not clearly made, as they are often used by practitioners as near synonyms when they are not. Similarly the distinction between the marketing of the product and that of the producer through corporate marketing is not explic- itly discussed when defining the terms [p.13] but is buried in a much later section on identity and culture [p.50].
The book is structured by a‘three gap place branding model’ [p.21]. The authors identify discrepancies between product and identity, product and experience and experience and image.
This clear and simple structure, adequate enough to serve as a clothes line on which to hang the discussion, is then illustrated by one of those complex, overloaded and for me quite incompre- hensible diagrams [p.41], into which everything is thrown in somewhere and the attempt to be all-encompassing results in unintelligibility.
A distinctive feature of the book is its use of case material.
Instead of drawing upon a myriad of different examples the authors have chosen to focus upon a small group of running cases that reas- suringly reappear throughout the book in illustration of different points. The advantages of this technique are that the background information needed by the reader to understand the significance of the case is built up incrementally, there is a depth of contextual
information and repetition of background facts is avoided. All the three major cases are authoritatively described on the basis of the authors’long experience.
Dubai is the longest and most often appearing such‘signature case’, which is a refreshingly original if somewhat unexpected deviation from the more well-known North American or European examples. However, this inevitably necessitates a long introduc- tion to society, economy and political structures in the Gulf States.
Any use of case studies is open to the accusations of providing too little information for the case to be understood or too much infor- mation not specifically relevant to the point being made. Here the authors err on the side of the latter and much of the long discus- sion of Dubai is about general economic and social development, in which branding no doubt played a role but the extent of this role is not carefully delineated which is what the reader requires.
The reader learns that the‘success of Dubai as a global brand to date has not been built on fancy brand construction strategies’ [p.88], which is somewhat surprising to an outsider aware of the country only through its spectacular buildings and urban designs.
The other signature cases are novel if less well embedded in the general argument. The Dutch province of Zeeland is used to illus- trate associations between place identity (specifically expressed through place nomenclature) and gastronomy, which it is argued is important for identification by both tourists and residents. The simple and interesting relationship however, is somewhat buried under methodological detail. Indeed there is a tendency to over- burden all the case studies with too much detail when most readers are really only interested in a summary of thefindings. The case of Flanders appears only once and is a lengthy and faintly incon- gruous, history of the Flemish nationalist movement and an ethno-political description of contemporary Belgium. Its relevance to the place branding issues is not made explicit.
That the book is obsessed with place branding for tourism is unlikely to be a problem perhaps for readers of this journal. The key structuring model [p.41] is based on a hosts/guests dichotomy and the authors constantly fall back upon their experience of tourism destination management at the cost of ignoring the non- tourism markets. It is, however, a truism to state that residents are the most important target group in place marketing and that successful external branding should be preceded by internal brand- ing among residents and current users. It is not enough to conclude that‘The quality of the place experience is derived from the inter- face between host and guest’[p135].
The conclusions return to the three gap model [p.245] in an assessment of the extent to which the gaps have been bridged and a discussion of the major remaining issues (all of which are related directly to tourism but would be equally applicable to other markets). The three gaps remain evident, namely: unique identities are not transformed into products reflecting this uniqueness;
Contents lists available atScienceDirect
Tourism Management
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / t o u r m a n
doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2010.06.002
Tourism Management xxx (2010) 1–2
product performance is often disappointing due to off brand imple- mentation; and cultural differences still determine that different groups perceive brands differently.
Ultimately the authors are more optimistic than I. The gaps and issues, quite correctly, identified, are not particularly new. Despite the valiant efforts of this book the gap between academic commen- tators, including the authors, and those in public or private sector place management actually engaging in branding seems to me to be as wide and as unbridgeable as ever. I agree with the authors’
arguments and applaud their attempt to impose some systematic thinking upon practice: however I wonder and doubt if the busy practitioners are listening to us.
G.J. Ashworth University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail address:[email protected] 13 May 2010 Book Review / Tourism Management xxx (2010) 1–2
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