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This paper aims to report on the insights from an international workshop entitled Co-creating place brands: sharing research insights and practical experiences towards more inclusive cities and regions hosted by the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The authors outline their collective reflection and the learnings for place branding theory and practice. Additionally, this paper discusses the need to build practitioner-scholar relationships in a co-creative style, to co-develop more inclusive models for co-creating place brands.

The report details key learnings of a whole-day interactive workshop featuring academic and practitioner presentations and discussions around inclusive approaches to co-creating place brands. The report is structured around key emerging themes and their associated learnings.

The workshop yielded six important learnings: 1) a key obstacle to co-creating place brands is that co-creation is often misunderstood among decision-makers; 2) all place stakeholders need to be taken seriously if co-creation is to shape a place’s identity and foster cohesion; 3) broad stakeholder inclusion in place branding can be problematic, but it is a necessary condition to the practice of place brand co-creation; 4) co-creating place brands requires going beyond marketing tools and deep into the levels of community life and place’s social and cultural construction; 5) co-creation at all stages of the branding process from conceptual development to performance measurement and sometimes unconsciously; 6) politics of place must be observed (this is crucial yet easily overlooked in co-creating place brands).

The micro-format of the workshop facilitated valuable interactions between academics and practitioners, effectively blending practical, “on the ground”-knowledge with academic ideas, concepts and models. This approach not only generated key learnings with the possibility to advance the field but also highlighted important future research directions.

This paper aims to provide conceptual clarity on the different approaches of place branding in the literature. It discusses three main approaches and provides a new definition of place brands that acknowledges the full multi-sensory experience of place brands. This paper also elaborates brand management within the three approaches.

Conceptual paper

This study identifies three co-existing approaches of place branding and provides a definition of place brands for each of them. The first approach conceptualises place brands as symbolic constructs that identify and differentiate places from others. Brand symbols such as logos and slogans are central, assuming that brand meaning resides in them. The second approach views place brands as images and associations in the minds of target groups, whereby brands reside in individuals’ minds (the cognitive). This paper aligns with a third approach that views place brands as experiential, multi-sensory constructs. Brands invite not only mental representations in people’s minds but especially also multi-sensory embodied experiences. The authors thus define place brands as marketing systems that consist of dynamic performative assemblages of symbolic, discursive, institutional and material elements that selectively invite certain multi-sensory and embodied experiences of place by stakeholders and target groups.

This paper contributes to conceptual clarity by providing an analytical framework identifying three main approaches to place branding. The authors further reflect on the implications of each approach for brand management. This paper also builds on recent literatures to provide a new and contemporary definition of place brands as multi-sensory experiences that encompasses embodiment.

Place branding research has recently focused on developing more inclusive models to better capture the co-creation of place identities. This paper aims to investigate stakeholder communication interactions in place branding processes to inform alternative, participatory, network governance models of stakeholder engagement.

The literature on stakeholder engagement in place branding processes is sparse. Through a regional case study of the Australian island state of Tasmania, the paper combines participatory action research (PAR) with the method of sociological intervention (SI) to investigate how participants individually and collectively reflect on their practices and patterns of engagement.

By combining PAR with SI, participants were enabled to gain a greater appreciation of how cooperation and collective self-reflection enhance effective place branding practices. Furthermore, by facilitating participants to compile a list of impediments to collaboration, the research informs efforts to develop more inclusive governance models for place branding. Finally, the PAR/SI method itself served as a practical tool to encourage enhanced stakeholder engagement in applied settings.

The approach is based on a single case study in a particular regional context and the findings require replication in other jurisdictions.

PAR/SI is a practical tool to achieve greater stakeholder engagement and enhance collaborative social action through a process of collective, critical reflection in applied settings.

The paper advances understanding of ways to operationalize participatory place branding through more inclusive, multistakeholder governance arrangements.

This study aims to explore whether adopting a sustainability narrative in city branding and urban development strategies results in more inclusive governance arrangements (process) and a more pluralistic approach to generating sustainability value (outcome), in line with the triple bottom line approach advocated by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors argue that a necessary step to enable meaningful sustainable urban development is to rethink the way in which “value” and “value creation” are being interpreted in urban development policies and city branding narratives.

Mixed-methods case study of New York City’s (NYC) urban development and city branding strategies (2007–2019) combining analysis of academic and grey literature on NYC’s urban development and city branding, value hierarchies in NYC urban development strategic plans and local media reports covering NYC’s development and branding processes.

Despite claiming commitment to urban sustainability, NYC’s urban development and branding narratives reveal a clear dominance of interpreting “value” primarily as “exchange value”, thus prioritising economic growth.

In the authors’ view, a systemic, systematic and structured approach to generating “sustainability value” is necessary if city branding is to become a governance tool to support sustainable urban development. A “tetravaluation” approach is recommended as a practical, structured framework that can bridge across the ideas of “sustainability value” and “pluralistic governance”, ensuring effective implementation. Further investigation in additional urban contexts is required.

The research contributes to current scholarly debates towards more balanced and pluralistic conceptions of “value” and place branding as a more holistic, participatory and democratic governance model for sustainable urban development.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on participatory place branding processes and, in particular, on multiple actors’ ability to build agency.

An in-depth qualitative inquiry of place branding processes in Cardiff (UK) was undertaken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured (online) interviews with 28 city representatives from the public, private and voluntary sectors are analysed using three-stage conceptual coding.

Five transitions in the meaning-making and engagement processes at the nexus of participatory place branding are identified: heightening value of the local environment; building and sharing local knowledge; embedding a sense of community into relational networks; innovating engagement channels; and blurring of roles and responsibilities. Combined, these demonstrate a cultivating place (brand) attachment and evolving logics around participation.

Transitions in actor agency require monitoring over time, drawing on additional studies, wider samples and multidisciplinary frameworks.

Local knowledge and multi-actor networks are increasingly viewed as valuable assets, providing legitimacy for those in possession of these resources and for the brand. Practitioners, policy makers and community representatives should support innovative ways to involve and learn from local actors, including those not currently active across the place brand web.

Antecedents to actor agency are investigated, highlighting that during a period of disruption actors gained legitimacy for their participation by emphasising the value attached to localities, building place (brand) attachment and drawing on blurred place branding boundaries.

Drawing on the service-dominant logic and taking a multi-stakeholder brand value co-creation perspective, this paper aims to investigate whether positioning a place brand around sustainability helps or hinders stakeholders’ ability to co-create value for themselves and the brand.

This paper is based on a case study of Bristol’s city branding following its award of European Green Capital, drawing on 29 in-depth interviews with key informants from multiple stakeholder groups. These interviews are supported by secondary material and field observations.

The findings evidence a “tale of two cities”. When sustainability is used as a positioning device, tensions are identified across three elements of brand co-creation: brand meanings; extraordinary versus mundane brand performances; and empowerment and disempowerment in branding governance. These tensions create stakeholder experiences of both engagement and estrangement.

This paper is based on one case study and evaluates face-to-face stakeholder interactions. Future research could access further stakeholders, across multiple cities and also examine their digital engagement.

Positioning a brand as sustainable (i.e. green) requires strong commitment to other ethical principles in practice. Brand practitioners and marketers may benefit from advancing stakeholders’ everyday brand performances to reduce disillusionment.

Rallying around virtuous associations, i.e. sustainability, does not in itself facilitate the generation of value for stakeholders and the brand, but instead can illuminate power imbalances and tensions in stakeholder interactions that result in a co-destruction of value.

This study aims to identify how Spanish consumers’ extrinsic preferences for food have evolved by examining the extant literature on food preferences in Spain, focusing on food-related attributes and food-related values.

This study is based on a synthetic review of the extant academic literature on Spanish consumer preferences for food-related attributes and food-related values from the mid-20th to the 21st century. This study uses key economic and social milestones that are most likely to influence food value chain actors to show how consumer preferences have evolved over the study period.

Spanish consumer food attribute preferences expanded as the food sector of the nation continued to grow, and value preferences showed a similar pattern from the mid-20th to the 21st century. The drivers of these preferences were trust, lifestyle, education (campaigns), sociodemographic factors and purchasing power.

Evaluating the extant literature’s contribution to consumer preferences for food-related attributes and values is important because it can aid in understanding the hierarchy and variety of consumers’ food preferences as well as the factors that drive these preferences. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore how Spanish consumer preferences evolved between the mid-20th and 21st centuries.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.