There is now a consensus about the suitability of marketing for places, and that places, indeed, should be marketed as efficiently as companies’ market products or services. It is now time for places to start to benefit from the best sophisticated marketing practices in the private sector. Place marketing means designing a place to satisfy the needs of its target markets. It succeeds when citizens and businesses are pleased with their community, and the expectations of visitors and investors are met. Strategic marketing can be also applied to places, and the tools of corporate marketing can be transferred to place marketing. Places can also be branded, through creating and communicating a place identity, which increases a place’s attraction. Therefore the object of city marketing is the city’s image, which in turn is the starting point for developing the city’s brand.

In the face of an ever-expanding urban population, Place Branding and Marketing addresses this knowledge debit in order to illustrate how place branding can contribute to transforming urban mass into sustainable and healthy areas. The framework focuses on the use of city branding and its potential effects on city residents and the way residents associate with and experience their city, and it is based on a combination of city marketing measures and the components of the city’s brand management. This book provides a better understanding of how social media is being used by municipalities and how it fits into place marketing and place branding. The aim of the present book is to evaluate which are the most critical success factors in place marketing, and how these factors could be utilized in place development. The focus of the present book is on city-regions among places, and their foreign inward investment activity, in the analyses of success factors in place marketing practices, emphasizing the aspect of branding, but is also loosely connected in its operational environment with strategic management.