“Creative as Berlin, as successful as Frankfurt”: The Symbolic Benefit of Cities as Objective of an Image-Orientated City Brand Management

Abstract

The inter-municipal competition of European cities, the alignment tendencies of functional urban features as well as the growing social trend towards individualization and the communication of one’s own identity convey the importance of the city’s image as influencing factor of the choice of location of skilled workers, tourists and companies. Cities are increasingly seen as a tool for defining one’s personality and the expression of one’s lifestyle. While great attention has been given to personality characteristics as important factor of purchase decisions in the consumer goods sector, symbolic benefits thus gain importance as decision criteria of where to work, travel or found a company. The article discusses the concept of symbolic brand benefits in the city context, a topic that has yet received little attention in the German speaking city marketing discussion. Against this background, the predominantly in the English speaking literature debated concept of “place branding” will be described as a more developed version of city marketing that puts the image of cities in the focus of all city-related marketing activities. The author argues that the symbolic city image is the result of communicative negotiation processes, whose origins lay in real actions, activities and events that occur in a city. With the description of the communicative potential of the visual cityscape the author presents a range of levers for the development of a symbolic city image.