Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
36
City marketing as a planning tool
Michael Barke
marketing approaches, specifically concerned with
non-business or non-profit organisations; what
came to be known as 'social' marketing (Kotler
and Levy 1969; Kotler and Zaltman 1971). The
second trend was the onset of an 'urban crisis',
which had many manifestations but which was
widely perceived at the time as leading to the
potential terminal decline of traditional urban
economies, with a consequent imperative for
economic restructuring (Massey 1984; Lever 1987;
Fretter 1993; Holcomb 1993). The latter
stimulated the search for new roles for cities and
new ways of managing their problems. Initially,
this took the form of simple 'promotion' of the
city and its attractions but gradually, in some areas,
this has evolved into more sophisticated marketing
exercises. Whereas 'promotion' is related merely
to the idea of trying to sell something, marketing
is concerned with finding out what it is that
potential consumers wish to buy. Much of the
early literature on place marketing was concerned
with the USA (Lewis 1978) and the apparently
spectacular 'turn-arounds' in economic fortunes
experienced by cities such as Baltimore, Pittsburgh
and Cleveland (Holcomb 1993). Such successes
prompted investigations of the 'ways and means'
by which decline could be reversed (Guskind
1987; Bailey 1989). Similar ideas were rapidly
taken up in European cities (Korn
et al
. 1994),
most notably in the Netherlands (Ashworth and
Voogd 1988) and, although sporadically at first,
also in Britain (Clarke 1986; Wilkinson 1992).
Although they are rather different in tone, the
epitome of this 'technical' literature on how to
CITY MARKETING: THE FIELD OF
STUDY
Place marketing, of which city marketing is by far
the most significant component, has generated a
massive literature. Between 1990 and 1994, five
major topics were published (Ashworth andVoogd
1990; Kearns and Philo 1993; Kotler
et al
. 1993;
Gold and Ward 1994; Smyth 1994) containing
242, 560, 248, 633 and 164 references, respectively.
Recently, a selective bibliography of city
marketing literature consisting of over 280
references was issued (Millington
et al
. 1997). Most
of this literature is also very recent. Students of
citation will not be surprised to learn that a
substantial proportion of this literature is mutually
reinforcing but, while city marketing cannot claim
to be a discipline in its own right, it is an area of
study within which distinctive 'schools' have
emerged. In broad terms, the literature divides into
three relatively separate groups.
The first category consists of work whose
origin lies primarily either in the practice of
marketing or in marketing theory. Although place
marketing has a host of historical antecedents
(Glaab 1967; Jarvis 1994; Ward 1988; 1990; 1994;
Zube and Galante 1994) and specific cities have a
long history of boosterism, for example Atlanta
(Rutheiser 1996) and Syracuse, New York state
(Roberts and Schein 1993; Short
et al
. 1993), the
application of marketing techniques to cities and
other locations stems particularly from two
contemporaneous trends in the late 1960s and
1970s. One concerned the development of new
