Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
achieve best practice in city marketing is found in
two of the volumes cited earlier, Kotler et al . (1993)
and Ashworth and Voogd (1990), focusing upon
the USA and Europe, respectively.
The actual process of marketing is likely to vary
from place to place, but various typologies have
been suggested (Ashworth and Voogd 1988). The
purpose is to bring together 'customers' and
'products' and with this objective, a number of
essential elements should be present in the
marketing process. First, the functions of the urban
area must be commodified and positioned. In
other words, they must be examined as if they
were products and their relative competitive
position studied. Then the actual or potential users
of such products or functions need to be
considered and their characteristics or market
segments determined. Once these two processes
have been concluded, the choice of the most
appropriate marketing strategy or strategies must
be made. The plural is important because, of
course, different elements of the urban structure
may need quite different marketing strategies. The
actual marketing itself could involve a wide range
of measures, which could include new
developments or activities, some of which may be
specific new 'flagship' developments,
organisational measures that may improve the
functioning of the city and its managers
themselves and, finally, specific promotional
activities. It is the latter that has attracted most
attention and usually involves the creation of new
or different images for the place concerned. The
latter may be communicated by a variety of means
and for a variety of audiences, depending on the
market segmentation findings investigated earlier.
Outlined in this way, a city marketing strategy is
clearly a highly sophisticated operation, and one
of the issues to be discussed later concerns the gap
between the 'ideal' as described above and as
promulgated in the marketing literature and the
actual reality of the majority of city marketing.
The second major body of literature, and by far
the largest, is concerned with various aspects of
place image and place identity and how these may
be manipulated for marketing purposes (Burgess
1982; Gold 1994). The tone of much of this
literature is critical, with many commentators
expressing concern over issues such as the loss of
'authenticity' (Plate 36.1) and the question of in
whose interests is such manipulation carried out.
Students of cultural studies have found fertile
ground in the city marketing phenomenon for
their deconstructions and reinterpretations of the
meaning of place and the way that place is
represented (Burgess and Gold 1985). Therefore,
in addition to the study of the nature of 'new'
images and what lies behind their content (Watson
1991; Barke and Harrop 1994) an important
subset of the literature is concerned with the
political context of city marketing and
regeneration (Shaw 1993; Boyle 1995; Hall and
Hubbard 1996; Strange 1997). A further
development in the literature has related to the
way that images and other 'marketing'
information is communicated. Most obviously this
is in various forms of advertising, but it is clear
that city marketing also involves the promotion of
specific high-profile events and flagship
Plate 36.1 Catherine Cookson country: South
Tyneside's well-known attempt to associate itself with a
popular local author.
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