“Benchmarking allows us to actively share our responses to communication challenges with our peers and demonstrate our best foot forward,” stated Daniela Montiel, International Partnerships Manager at Marca Chile and one of the Jury members for the 2019 City Nation Place Awards. She added, “In my case, reviewing the benchmarks/entries from the past couple of years has truly been a source of inspiration.”

So what are our judges looking for? What do they think are the key ingredients of a great place strategy or place marketing campaign?

The meteoric rise in social media usage has provided an entirely new medium for countries to share their stories with the world. But how do you walk the line of promoting what makes your place unique whilst still acknowledging your history? Dr Robert Paul Jones, Executive Director of the G.U.E.S.T center at Texas Tech University shared his insights with us before he joins us as a speaker at City Nation Place Latin America & Caribbean.

We asked Federico Moreno-Nickerson, Vice President of Development, Apple Leisure Group, to share his take on the key trends affecting place branding.

At first, Latin America seems enticing with its sunny weather, low cost of living, beautiful beaches, and incredible history. And without surprise, these features are frequently promoted in international travel and lifestyle media. 

But are these reasons enough to get a traveler or business motivated to seek out Latin America as their next destination?  Are the rich Latin culture, weather, and affordable cost what it takes to make its vibrant cities a top destination to work, live, and do business in?

Sometimes at City Nation Place HQ, it feels that we spend a lot of time focussing on the ever-evolving challenges that place branding faces – the problems that have us banging our heads on the wall in frustration. But it’s important to remember that there’s also a great opportunity to be creative and over the years, we’ve seen some truly innovative tourism and investment promotion campaigns. Here are just a few of the most imaginative and unusual place marketing campaigns that make our job, as collectors of place branding stories, so interesting.

We caught up with Leah Chandler, the Chief Marketing Officer at Discover Puerto Rico, and Nate Huff, Senior Vice President of Miles Partnership, in order to discover their takes on the key challenges facing place branding in the Latin American region.

We caught up with Daniela Montiel, International Partnerships Manager at Marca Chile, and one of our esteemed jurors for the City Nation Place Awards, to uncover her take on some of the key challenges facing place branding at the moment and what she will be looking for in an award-winning entry.

The FutureBrand Country Index measures the strength of perception of countries around the world in the same way we study consumer or corporate brands. Now in its second decade, the Index reorders the World Bank Top 75 countries by GDP according to strength of perception.

The Index examines what transforms a country from a spot on a map to a place our survey respondents ultimately want to invest in, live in, visit, and buy goods and services from. Countries have traditionally been measured and ranked by measures of might — GDP, population size, even a sovereign’s nuclear arsenal. However, in the current day when our world is defined by rapid change, do these measures continue to make sense in the ranking of nations?

We asked Caio Esteves, CEO & Founder of Places For Us, to share his take on the key trends affecting place branding.

June 6th saw nearly 200 dedicated place branders arriving in West Hollywood for the third annual City Nation Place Americas conference. As always, the debates were honest, the conversations cutting-edge, and it was an insightful and inspiring experience to exchange ideas with the top minds in destination marketing and economic development. However, in a day packed with perceptive commentary, there were five key ideas that particularly stood out to us.

We asked Glenn Jones, Chief Experience Development Officer, Bermuda Tourism Authority, to share their take on the key trends affecting place branding.

We caught up with Catherine Callary, Vice President - Destination Development at Ottawa Tourism, ahead of the City Nation Place Americas conference this week in order to discover her take on place making, collaboration, and the role of a destination marketing organisation.

Clare Dewhirst, Director of City  Nation Place, was fortunate to be invited to share what she has learned from our speakers, award entrants, and contributors around the key differences  between place branding and place marketing in a webinar session hosted by Civitas, one of our Partners for the 2019 City Nation Place Americas conference.  We’re happy to share the script for that session here…

We’ve been lucky enough to secure some of the most innovative, creative and strategic minds in place branding and economic development for the third annual City Nation Place Americas conference, and with just one week to go until the conference, we wanted to share some of our speakers’ best quotes to help inspire your own place brand vision.

As bite-sized vacations and road-trips are rising, Nashville sits at the cross-roads of several massive highways and within reasonable driving distance from a good swath of the population. Finally, Nashville is growing its population and its business-appeal. More people living there and drawn there for business meetings leads to word-of-mouth and “come visit me” requests that help fuel influence-based travel. Oh, and Music City is also booming because of great marketing.

But what’s next?