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1 Introduction
The place marketing that is so widely practised today all over the world did not just appear fully formed a few short years ago but has developed over time through discrete phases, which differ not only in their sophistication but also in their approaches and objectives. Place marketing has been shaped by developments within marketing science and cognate disciplines but also by the external historical contexts at various spatial scales that determined its assumptions, goals and priorities. A concordance of a number of approaches to the evolution of place marketing will be attempted and from these, conclusions will be drawn about the current assumptions upon which place marketing is based.
Seven issues are identified as significant for the future of place marketing, These are:
the need for a collective understanding and appreciation of place marketing before the marketing effort starts;
the significance of wide cooperation and clear role allocation as well as effective coordination of marketing activities;
the importance of implementing marketing as a process and not undertaking sporadic or fragmented activities;
the expansion of marketing understanding to fields other than tourism development;
the need to involve to a much higher degree local communities in the marketing effort and integrate their needs in all phases of the marketing process;
the widening of current understanding of inter-urban competition, which will open up possibilities to take better advantage of opportunities in the environment and finally; and
the better comprehension of monitoring and evaluating marketing activities as to their results.
2 Place marketing has a history
The rapid rise in popularity of place marketing over the past decade, at jurisdictional scales ranging from the local and neighbourhood to the national and even continental, 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 differentiate 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 specifically designed place identity and promote it to identified markets, whether external or internal, is almost as old as government itself. The phenomenon of places transferring marketing...