The emergence and development of place marketing: a tool at the service of territorial governance

Abstract

After proving its worth in the corporate world, marketing has gradually spread to other fields, creating specific types of marketing, including that applied to the territorial level. Faced with a globalized and competitive environment, place marketing continues to gain in popularity among academic researchers and practitioners, as well as local actors. Indeed, since its emergence, several factors have made place marketing today an essential tool for place development. It has become a strategy generally used by local actors in the governance processes of their territories, with the explicit aim of strengthening a place’s competitiveness and attractiveness in order to attract target audiences such as investors, tourists and talent. However, this practice is sometimes a lengthy process with many constraints and obstacles, and is not always crowned with success. Of course, place marketing, like other forms of governance, involves a variety of actors with different profiles and divergent interests. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the question of the extent to which place marketing, as a governance strategy, can contribute to place development. To this end, the approach adopted in this paper consists of a descriptive literature review. Thus, this contribution aims to highlight the emergence and development of place marketing in order, on the one hand, to determine its specific features and to better understand what differentiates it from classical marketing by relying on the difficulties of transposing marketing to the territorial framework, and on the other hand, to propose a conceptual research model for implementing a successful place marketing strategy. The conclusions suggest that a place marketing strategy, focused on stakeholder involvement and coordination, transparency, trust, and the satisfaction of target expectations, can promote place development through the improvement of place image and reputation, perceived values, stakeholder pride and mobilization, as well as the enhancement of local resources.

Keywords: place marketing, territory, actors, territorial governance, place marketing approach.

JEL Classification: M31, F43, R58.

Paper type: theoretical research.