Place as product: place branding and problems of its application

Abstract

Besides products and services marketing practices are being applied increasingly even to places. By means of place branding places compete for tourists, investors, inhabitants; improve their images and enforce their identities.

However, the emerging discipline of place branding has got several problems, largely related to the way it is treating places. After briefly introducing place branding the paper attempts to discuss these problems.

Keywords

• place
• place branding
• marketing
• regional development
• regional identity