Advertising Cities: City Marketing
A research proposal submitted to the Urban Studies and Planning Program
University of California at San Diego
Deion Lin
USP 186
dil008@ucsd.edu
October 19, 2010
Abstract
This proposal outlines a research strategy to examine economic redevelopment in
San Diego. Current research on economic redevelopment suggests that marketing
tactics will generate a sense of brand identity, therefore, command customers’
loyalty and achieve economic growth. This raises three fundamental problems:
What attract people to move to new cities? How to use the marketing tactics in
terms of cities? Will cities benefit from this concept, and How? This proposal
outlines a research strategy aimed at addressing these three problems. Specifically,
the study will rely on archival research, and survey students on campus. The
research will contribute to the literature on economic development and policy
making, but it will also be shared with public sector in the hope that the studies
will help improve competitiveness of San Diego.
Key terms: city marketing, economic development, policy making
I. Introduction
The basis of this proposal is centered around the importance of marketing a city and
creating a “brand” identity for the city. In today’s affluent society everyone is a consumer. In
everyday life, consumers are faced with many choices for comparable products. Companies must
then utilize advertising and marketing to sway consumers to buy their version, in an attempt to
embed the competitive traits of their product in the minds of consumers. In the end, the company
that has the best product (or the best advertising campaign) will reap the profits. If the company
is successful enough in its marketing tactics, it may even generate a sense of brand identity that
commands loyalty from customers.
The concept behind marketing a city is not much different, although everything is on a
much larger scale. With so many cities in the world, individuals and businesses are faced with
choosing where to settle and set up shop, and also a starting point for growth. The individual,
especially, is looking for a location worthwhile to settle down in, but is also looking for a
location that he can enjoy during his free time—that is, a place where he will be willing to spend
money on recreation. Both aspects of what the individuals are looking for are important, as they
help generate tax based revenue for the local government. In a city such as San Diego, attracting
more individuals will provide not only property tax revenue but also revenue from sales tax.
However, in order for the city to attract potential individuals and businesses it must stand out
against countless other cities in the world. Alex Deffner notes that:
City marketing is an integral part of urban planning for cities that wish to be really
competitive in today’s conditions. A properly designed and implemented marketing plan
can help every city to promote its competitive advantages, in order to succeed in the
sector that is indeed more powerful than its global competitors” (Deffner 19).
It must market its positive traits to the interests of the new generation of homeowners and
business owners. If the city is able to create an image that people want to align themselves with,
it will attract more people and businesses.
As the marketing is an important aspect of keeping a city economically on top, I would
like to explore what factors appeal most to people when choosing a city to move to. Given five
important twenty-first century issues: 1. Sustainability; 2. Effective Built Environment / Land
Usage; 3. Transportation; 4. Politics and Governance; and 5. Society and Culture, I would like to
research which of these issues San Diego should be marketed towards.
II. Conceptual Framework / Literature Review
The conceptual basis of this proposal centers around the ideas presented in Mihalis
Kavaratzis’ article City Marketing: The Past, the Present and Some Unresolved Issues. He has
summarized his studies into three steps (generations), from the basic practical needs to promote
desirability. City marketing and branding has historical precedence, stemming from the industrial
revolution and venturing towards the modern day world. Early city marketing focused on
practical needs:
“The first generation is termed ‘smokestack chasing’ and was concerned with generating
manufacturing jobs through attracting companies with subsidies and the promise of lowoperating costs and higher profits from existing or alternative sites. The poaching of
factories from other cities was a major element of local job promotion and urban
representation centered on low-operating costs and availability of subsidies” (Kavaratzis
696).
As marketing progressed, it still focused on the practical needs, but also extended towards more
traits that individuals and businesses would find attractive:
“The second generation, ‘target marketing’ (Bailey 1989), involves the attraction of
manufacturing and service jobs in target industries currently enjoying profitable growth.
There are still attempts at luring plants from other locations, but the promotion also
includes improving the physical infrastructure, vocational training and stressing good
public–private cooperation. Representation continues to mention low-operating costs but
includes the suitability of local community for target industries and the more general
notion of good quality of life, with an emphasis on recreational opportunities and the
local climate” (Kavaratzis 697).
However, in more recent times, marketing has become more advanced. It has expanded from
focusing on practical factors such as operating costs and infrastructure to focusing on creating an
image for the city that promotes desirability:
“The third generation, ‘product development’ (Bailey 1989), contains the objectives of
the first two stages but includes an emphasis on the ‘jobs of the future’, while
representation now includes global competitiveness, human and intellectual resources
along with low-operating costs and quality of life. This third stage of city marketing
application is clearly oriented towards competitive niche thinking, characterized by
cluster building and even more intense public-private partnership. As Short and Kim
(1999, 98) assess, ‘with each successive stage the message becomes more sophisticated
and urban representation has to include issues of quality of life’”(Kavaratzis 697).
Considering the historical precedents there have been parallels between the stages in a city’s
evolution and attempts to advertise and market the city. He mentions early cities advertising
traits such as low operating costs to attract business (696). In this case the city becomes a
company reaching out to businesses as customers and parallels a familiar concept of companies
marketing a product’s positive traits in order to attract more customers.
However, as the target consumer changes advertisers must cultivate new methods of
marketing. While cities of the past were able to capitalize on the basic desires of businesses,
modern day cities must do much more in order to attract both individuals and businesses. Our
current society is filled with overwhelming choices and overbearing media exposure, which
requires city marketers to focus on cultivating an image for their city:
“Next, there was a realization of the significance of the image of the city in two distinct
senses. First, that the image is the crucial and determining factor for the people who use
the city, whether investors and developers or, more clearly, visitors and residents. Second,
that the image of the city and the attempt to influence it could well be an effective way to
coordinate marketing efforts; that the desired image of the city could provide the
necessary target for marketing activities to aim at. It is this realisation that has caused the
recent popularity of the concept of city branding, which might well be the next episode in
the history of city marketing applications” (699).
Turning the city into a “brand” is not entirely new. It runs parallel to the tourism industry’s usage
of “destination branding: developing and managing tourism destinations as brands or treating
destinations as brands for their benefits to tourism growth (e.g. Morgan et al. 2002)” (702).
While used in the tourism sphere, branding should not be limited to it. If branding can bring flow
of temporary parties in and out of a city that supports the economy, branding should be able to
bring permanent residents (individuals and businesses) into the city to create a constant flow of
economic support.
In our society, where mass media and image play an undisputable role in shaping our
decisions, creating a positive brand association of a city in people’s minds is integral to
marketing it successfully. Kavaratzis explains the rationale behind turning a city into a “brand”
as a means of creating positive associations of the city in people’s minds:
“The stance of city branding advocates is rooted on two premises. The first is that the city
takes its form, content and meaning in peoples’ minds. People ‘meet’ and understand
cities through accepting their own perceptions and processing those perceptions into their
own understandable image of the city. In general, people make sense of places or
construct places in their minds through three processes (see, for example, Crang 1998;
Holloway and Hubbard 2001). First, through planned interventions like planning, urban
design and so on, second, through the way in which themselves or other people use
specific places and, third, through various forms of place representations like films,
novels, paintings, news reports and so on” (702).
The second is extremely important in the process of “branding” a city because it essentially
glamorizes the city—and what better way to create a positive association in people’s minds than
associating the city with glamour? An effective product-based example is the glamorization of
cigarettes in media that happened during the twentieth century—which was undeniably powerful,
and its impact still lasts today. By associating the product with an image of “cool,” tobacco
companies were able to establish their product as covetable and create a strong hold on
consumers. City branding is quite similar to product branding:
”This process is the same as the process followed to form images of other entities like
products, services and corporations, which have long been successfully managed as
brands. This leads to the conclusion that, in essence, people create brand associations
with cities and evaluate these associations in the same way as they evaluate associations
of other brands. In other words, people understand cities in the same way as they
understand brands” (703).
As with the product-based example, branding is powerful way to control people’s perceptions
and, subsequently, their decisions.
“ The second premise is only an extension of the first. It assumes that the best way to
attempt to influence peoples’ perceptions and images about cities is the same way that
businesses have been successfully attempting the same for their products and services,
namely branding. In other words, we should manage cities in the same way we manage
other brands, because branding deals with such mental images or mental maps. City
branding centres on people’s perceptions and images and puts them in the heart of
orchestrated activities, designed to shape the city and its future. Managing the city’s
brand becomes an attempt to influence and treat those mental maps in a way favourable
to the city’s circumstances and further needs for economic and social development”
(Kavaratzis 703)
The importance behind branding is that it promotes loyalty and creates desirability. Take the
example of automobiles. The general function of all cars is essentially the same—motorized
transport from point A to point B. However there are many brands of cars out there, Honda,
Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, to name a few. While there is a discernable difference between the
features in a Honda (mid range family car) and a BMW (high end luxury car), the space between
Honda and Toyota is much more comparable. In terms of cities, the difference between Honda
and BMW can be thought of as the difference between Inglewood (a low-income suburb) and
Calabasas (a moderate-to-high income suburb), while the difference between a BMW and
Mercedes can be compared to the difference between Calabasas and Arcadia. In terms of
branding, BMW and Mercedes have prestige associated with their names through not only the
nature of their product but through marketing campaigns, making them more desirable than
Hondas and Toyotas. However, branding still comes into play between comparable subsets—for
example, Hondas appeal more to certain people than Toyotas. The automobile example
illustrates the importance of branding to create associations in people’s minds of desirability, an
important aspect for those marketing cities to consider.
“City branding is here suggested as a new episode in the application of city marketing,
because it changes the focus of the endeavour. Branding is attempting to create
associations with the city; associations that are emotional, mental, psychological, moving
away from the functional–rational character of marketing interventions. This does not
mean that the functional–rational aspects are becoming less important. It signifies a
change of direction in that the desired brand is what guides the marketing measures on
the city’s physical environment and functionality. The rationale behind city branding is
that a city must first decide on what kind of brand it wants to become, how it can create
the mental, psychological and emotional ties that are necessary for the city to really
become this brand and what are the functional, physical attributes that the city needs to
create, improve, highlight and promote in order to support this brand” (704).
One of Kavaratzis’ most salient points is that city marketing is a client (consumer) driven
solution and is echoed by Gildo Seisdedos here: “Marketing does not consist of selling your
product at all costs, but rather in placing clients at the centre of your competitive strategy, to the
point that you are not targeting a global market indiscriminately, but rather segments with
different needs, using ad hoc marketing strategies” (Seisdedos 1). The consumers’ wants need to
be identified based on demographic so that marketing can be targeted towards specific desires
and needs.
So the question arises of how to market and brand San Diego. In considering marketing
San Diego, we must first consider the day and age. Five issues that are currently at the forefront
of concern are sustainability, effective land usage, transportation, politics, and society and
culture. These are goals that San Diego should be marketed and branded towards in order for it to
stick out above other cities. However, it is also important to research which of those factors have
the strongest impact on people when deciding to move to another city. That way San Diego can
be effectively marketed and branded towards “market trends.”
III. Research Method
Identifying the customers’ needs is the most important part of marketing. In order to
“understand the needs and wants of the city’s customers expressed in their aspired relevant
environment influence the selection and the perception of relevant environments and know more
about the evaluation of benefits and sacrifices leading to a decision” research needs to be
conducted among the target customers (Braun 67).
To determine how the city of San Diego should be branded, research will be conducted
by surveying fifty students on the UCSD campus. The question posed will be: “What attracts you
to move to a new city?” The survey will list five options: 1. Sustainability; 2. Effective Built
Environment / Land Usage; 3. Transportation; 4. Politics and Governance; and 5. Society and
Culture. Each option is indicative of a trait found in San Diego, with the survey intended on
finding out which traits of San Diego are most marketable. Each option will be followed by a
scale from zero to ten. Zero will signify what appeals what appeals the lowest to the participant,
and ten will signify what appeals highest to the participant. After all the surveys are completed,
the numerical values of each of the five options from the surveys will be averaged to find out
which two traits of San Diego are most marketable.
The positive value of conducting a survey is that surveys can collect more objective data
than interviews. The survey will pose options with numerical values that can be averaged to find
out which traits of San Diego are most desirable. On the other hand, the negative aspect of
surveys is that people may not put as much thought into their responses as they would in an
interview. Plus, not all of people have knowledge or even thought about the options listed above.
People happened to move to a new city for various reasons. However, for the purpose of this
research, the survey is the best way to obtain objective data that can be averaged to rank the
marketable traits.
IV. Conclusion
This research will help determine several marketing targets for San Diego--that is, which
of today’s main issues regarding cities do people care about most, and how to market San Diego
towards those topics. By identifying what people want, it then becomes possible to “brand” the
city. Just like how corporations use marketing campaigns to form positive associations of their
product in consumers’ minds, city marketers can tap into the consumers’ psyche too by
identifying what appeals most to the target group--which is the goal of this research. Image if
San Diego can be known across the board as the go-to sustainable city or the new hot spot for
culture and arts. By determining what is important to consumers, San Diego can be marketed just
like any other product to create positive associations in consumers’ minds that will hopefully
sway them to move to San Diego when the time comes to choose. However, the benefits are not
only financial--effective marketing and direction can spark growth for a city:
“Cities can grow without having a collective identity merely by the accretion of people,
but this does not mean that they will be particularly livable. Cities become livable and
can achieve greatness only by design and effort. Money can be made, of course, even in
dying communities, and there are always assets that are temporarily underpriced. It is
easier to make money from growth, however, and it is better for society if money-making
is also tied to social improvements. But those improvements must be along some agreed
dimensions; otherwise, responses are haphazard and the community's attempt to move in
purposeful directions will be thwarted" (Behrman 124)
By designing an image for the city, city marketers may also become agents of change for the
city--they may create the direction that the city may follow into the future that may lead to
increased livability, growth, and greatness.
Bibliography
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Deffner A, Liouris C. City Marketing : A Significant Planning Tool for Urban Development in a
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