Download The strategic application of city marketing to middle

the Strategic
application of
City Marketing
to middle-sized Cities
the postition in an urban hierarchy
as an element in city marketing
strategies: explored using three
cases of middle-sized cities
August 2007
Master Thesis for the title of Research
Master (MSc.) in Human Geography and
Planning
by: Martin Boisen
Supervisor: Professor Rob van der Vaart
Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
The strategic application of city marketing to middle-sized Cities
Master Thesis by M. Boisen
This thesis is delivered in the partial fulfilment of the degree Research Master in Human Geography and Planning
(Master of Science) at the Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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Consisting of 38.520 words, using 251.001 units, this thesis amounts to ca. 105 normalized pages (2.400 units).
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symbolises the new phenomenon of city marketers, professional experts that specialize in the application of
marketing-theory and -practice to the scene of the city.
© 2007 – Martin Boisen, Student-ID: 0503975
The exclusive rights to be identified as the author of this thesis are reserved. No publication or re-production in any
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Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
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Foreword and acknowledgements
In my studies I have always sought to find topics where academic curiosity can
result in applicable knowledge. City marketing is on the agenda and many cities are
busy developing strategies and initiatives to secure or improve their position in a
more or less perceived state of competition. During the last years I have thoroughly
studied the literature and observed the way in which city marketing strategies has
been applied to cities. This study started out as an exploration into the application
and implementation of city marketing strategies to middle-sized cities in the
Netherlands. The actuality and relevance of the study has been underlined by the
large interest from civil servants, city marketers, consultants and scholars from
related disciplines. The process of carrying out the study, and writing this thesis,
has been intensive, interesting and intriguing – and it is with pleasure that I
conclude these explorations and plan towards gaining further insight into the
captivating topic of city marketing and urban governance. Along the way, more and
more questions have arisen and I aim to continue the quest to find answers and
identify concepts that are theoretically satisfying and practically applicable.
As author of this thesis I owe my gratitude and thankfulness to a lot of people that
have been of assistance to this research, friends and family that has made my
studies and stay in Utrecht both possible and enjoyable.
A special merit goes to my supervising professor Rob van der Vaart from the
Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, who has given clear, constructive and
motivating guidance through the whole process. Further, I would like to thank Loes
Knotter from Berenschot, Assistant Professor Erik Braun from Erasmus University of
Rotterdam and Professor Christian Wichmann Matthiessen from University of
Copenhagen for inspiration, discussion and help in opening eyes and doors along
the way. Laurens Fijn van Draat and Roel Verschoor have helped in forcing me to
become more specific about the way I dealt with this topic and I appreciate their
critical questions and interesting ideas. I am also grateful for the distraction,
curiosity and huge supplies of coffee offered by Marc, Leah, Dianna and Leila from
VIVAVIDA, where most of this thesis was written.
Additional thanks goes out to my interviewees from the three case cities: Almere,
Amersfoort and Leiden, who took time out of their busy calendars to participate in
this research; lending their answers, opinions and perceptions of city marketing in
their respective cities to this study.
Most importantly, I would like to thank my family and friends in Denmark for
supporting me in my choice to leave my country (and them) behind – to seek new
challenges in the Netherlands. The work with this thesis is dedicated to them.
Accordingly, I am thankful for the overwhelming reception I have received in the
Netherlands – my girlfriend Mieke, the Verschoor-family and the new friends that
have made it easier to settle here.
Thank you,
Martin Boisen
rd
Utrecht, 3 of August 2007
Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
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“The beginning lies in the realisation that all
encounters with the city take place through
perception.” (Kavaratzis, 2004; p66)
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction
06
2. What is city marketing?
2.1 The duality of scientific theory in city marketing
2.2 Inter-urban competition – fact or fiction?
2.3 A brief review of the theoretical contributions
2.4 Making city marketing operational for this study
2.5 Geographical reasoning and theoretical expectations
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3. Methodology
3.1 Research questions
3.2 Positioning this study
3.3 Terminology
3.4 Methodological approach
3.4.1 The literature study
3.4.2 The selection of case-cities
3.4.3 The study of advisory reports and policy documents
3.4.4 The selection and conduction of interviews
3.5 Strengths and weaknesses of the used methodology
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3. The
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
case of Almere – everything is possible!
SWOT-analysis of Almere
The ambitions and visions of Almere
The implementation and organisation of city marketing
The role of neighbouring cities
City Marketing in Almere
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5. The
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
case of Amersfoort – the city with a heart!
SWOT-analysis of Amersfoort
The ambitions and visions of Amersfoort
The implementation and organisation of city marketing
The role of neighbouring cities
City marketing in Amersfoort
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6. The
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
case of Leiden – key to discovery!
SWOT-analysis of Leiden
The ambitions and visions of Leiden
The implementation and organisation of city marketing
The role of neighbouring cities
City marketing in Leiden
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7. Applied city marketing to middle-sized cities
7.1 Comparing the findings and the expectations
7.2 Three cities, three approaches?
7.3 Stakeholders, opinion-shapers and organising capacity
7.4 The lack of competitor identification
7.5 Consequences of supply-side urban governance
7.6 Strategic city marketing for middle-sized cities in the Netherlands
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8. Conclusion
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9. Perspectives
9.1 Reflections on the conducted study
9.2 Notions for further studies
9.3 Policy recommendations
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10. References and appendixes
10.1 Literature
10.2 List of figures
10.3 List of Appendixes
10.4 English Abstract
10.5 Dutch Abstract (Nederlandse samenvatting)
10.6 Danish Abstract (Dansk resume)
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1. Introduction
The contemporary ruling discourse of cities being in competition with each other
has led city governments to undertake strategic measures to seek to improve or
maintain their city’s competitive position. Cities today, increasingly lobby for more
administrative and fiscal elbow-room to manoeuvre in more flexible and
entrepreneurial ways (Brenner, 2004; Paddison, 1993). The changing role of cities,
the globalisation of the economy, the lessening impact of borders and traderestrictions, the de-industrialisation, the shift to a knowledge economy, the rescaling of statehood: all contributes to a more or less perceived state of inter-urban
competition (Boyle & Hughes, 1994; Cuadrado-Roura & Rubalcaba-Bermejo, 1998;
Jessop, 1998a; Thornley & Newman, 1996). And while it is clear that the impact of
such developments differ enormously over space, the idea that places do compete
against each other has become mainstream. The neo-liberal approach to economic
policy – which organisations such as the European Union, the WTO, the OECD and
opinion-shaping institutions akin refer to – plays a large role in the justification of the
focus on competitiveness (Swyngedouw, Moulaert, & Rodriguez, 2002). City
marketing represents one of the more unconventional elements of the increasingly
entrepreneurial attitude to urban governance and planning that has gained
momentum over especially the last two decades (Matthiessen, 2003).
In the scientific community, city marketing has been the object of both theorybuilding and speculation. The link between inter-urban competition, entrepreneurial
cities and city marketing measurements has provided the obvious basis for a
number of theories on the content and implementation of city marketing strategies
as part of urban governance. A number of contributions from geographers focus on
the problems with the commoditisation of the city, while marketing-scholars more
focus on the application of traditional marketing-tools to cities. Whereas these
contributions have provided the basis for this relatively new area of study, they are
generally supported of very little empirical observation, if any. In the meantime,
practitioners have embarked on city marketing strategies in their own way – initiated
by ambitious visions to achieve further growth (Jensen, 2005; Theodoros, 2002), or
as one of the answers to the threat of economic decline (Gold & Ward, 1994;
McCann, 2004).
Today, almost all large cities in Europe have applied some sort of city marketing
strategy (Seisdedos, 2006). The extent to which such strategies are implemented,
the content of the strategies and the sort of initiatives included vary tremendously
from place to place. The large campaigns with fancy slogans and newly designed
logos are given much attention in the media. This might be the reason why many
civil servants and scientific scholars intuitively react sceptical or even negative when
“city marketing” is mentioned. While the pure promotional aspect should not be
overlooked, more sophisticated approaches to city marketing include other aspects
which echo that a general awareness that a more supply-side approach to the
cities role as service providers and spatial containers for economic and social
activities might be fruitful.
In the Netherlands, representing the context of this study and one of the most
densely populated countries of Europe, city marketing is increasingly applied. Not
only have the large urban nodes, such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague,
Utrecht and Eindhoven embarked on the quest of increased attention and
attraction; the middle-sized cities wants to play their part too. From secondary,
tertiary and even lower levels of the national urban hierarchy, cities employ city
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marketing strategies. Consequently, a variety of different approaches, organisations
and initiatives have spawned into existence – leaving city marketing as a containerterm, because of the many different meanings attributed to it.
While the scientific studies in the last years have concentrated on large cities and
their role in a globalizing economy, the middle-sized cities have often been
overlooked in the empirical observations made (Smidt-Jensen, 2005). This might be
logic, given a view where the largest urban nodes are the ones facing the
consequences of the developments the most – but on the other hand the middlesized cities exists in a fiercer competitive field where the potential benefits/losses
are likely to have stronger impacts (Löfgren, 2000). If we concur that inter-urban
competition forms a serious issue, it is plausible that middle-sized cities face more
competition because of the mere number of cities in this category. This holds true
both for national dimensions and international dimensions. It also seems rather logic
that the successful implementation of city marketing strategies is likely to contribute
more to a middle-sized city than to a large city, in relative terms. Furthermore, it is
evident that cities of this size are eager to explore the possibilities of city marketing,
and in the last years more and more middle-sized cities have introduced a more
marketing-inspired way of thinking about their acquisition, management and
planning.
More empirical studies are needed to uncover how city marketing becomes part of
contemporary urban governance. This study modestly aims to contribute to our
understanding of city marketing by focusing on the middle-sized city. As a result of
the underlying argumentation of inter-urban competition, this study will seek to
explore whether nearby cities plays a role in the formation of city marketing
strategies. This can be seen as an indication of whether city marketing strategies
are strategic, well-considered measures following an application of marketing
strategies to urban governance – or more the results of a growing trend or hype. In
a reflected, sophisticated and well-thought approach to city marketing strategies,
one should expect cities to take their potential competitors into account when
making their own considerations and strategic choices. The goal of this study is
therefore to explore and analyze to what extent middle-sized cities’ city marketing
strategies are influenced by the presence of nearby cities.
Naturally, before the exploration can begin it is necessary to devote some attention
to the concept of city marketing itself, and how it relates to the developments it
often is seen as a direct consequence of. Also, giving the container-term status of
the concept, it is necessary to make an operational concept and definition of city
marketing before exploring how it is applied to cities. These issues will be given
attention in chapter 2, in which the most important contributions from the scientific
literature briefly will be reviewed. The third chapter of this thesis is devoted to the
methodology of this study and further elaborates on the research goal, presents
research questions and the methodology put in force to conduct the research and
explore the application of city marketing to Dutch urban governance. Chapters 4, 5
and 6 follows the logic structure of the thesis, and presents our three case-studies;
Almere, Amersfoort and Leiden. In these case studies, the operational concept is
applied in an explorative investigation. Combining the observations made in the
three case studies, chapter 7 draw some general conclusions and attempt to refer
back to the theoretical knowledge and expectations presented in chapter 2.
Chapter 8 presents the general conclusion of this study, followed by a brief chapter
presenting some notions for further studies and policy recommendation.
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2. What is city marketing?
Although due attention will be given to the meaning of the different terms and
concepts repetitively used in this thesis in section 3.3, a more in-depth discussion
of the concept of city marketing itself and the fundamental theories behind it is in
order. The purpose not to be the devising of a globally applicable concept, but
merely the reflected understanding of city marketing as a phenomenon building
upon some of the mainstream developments in urban governance and public
management and planning. In other words, the purpose of this chapter is to deduct
what city marketing should mean, rather than what it does mean. By exploring and
discussing this, important observations on city marketing can be extracted without
searching a confrontation with terminological containers – but by critically looking at
why city marketing has developed into a hype-like state among Dutch cities, and
how this links up with our theoretical understanding of what constitutes the
elements of city marketing.
In this chapter we will explore city marketing and seek to define what city marketing
means and how we can render the conceptual thinking operational in the Dutch
context. To do this we will lend attention to the very fundamentals for thinking about
city marketing: First we will look at the duality involved with city marketing –
especially in relation to the different scientific schools of thought involved (section
2.1). Issues such as inter-urban competition and related developments will be
treated in the subsequent section (2.2), to establish the background for the concept
and the phenomenon as such and allow for a reasoning of how cities should be
expected to react to the developments which renders city marketing endemic to
contemporary urban governance. Following these two important sections, a critical
review of the available theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing city marketing will
be provided (2.3) along with a section exploring how city marketing can be
rendered operational for the sake of this type of study (2.4). The last section of this
chapter is devoted to posing some theoretical expectations to the strategic
application of city marketing to middle-sized cities. These expectations are based
on geographical reasoning and are incorporated into this study in the sense that
this study will explore whether these expectations holds true or not (2.5).
2.1 The duality of scientific theory on city marketing
A number of dualities are at work here. First and foremost the difference in
approach to city marketing, depending on whether the scientific or practical
dimension is in focus. A scientist looks at city marketing as a specific way in which
cities react to a perceived state of inter-urban competition, whereas a practitioner
looks at city marketing as a specific tool-box from which specific managerial
practices can be employed. This difference, though obvious, creates a bias where
practitioners ask the scientists to be more specific while the scientists, sometimes
rightfully, might look upon the action of the practitioners as distant from any link to
the reality behind inter-urban governance.
Another duality is the gap between policy action and the possibilities of tracing the
potential effects they may have. It goes to reason that when public money is
invested in specific initiatives, evaluative attempts are made to prove whether such
attempts are adding value to the city. In other words, although the budgets
allocated to city marketing in general are not among the most prominent, the
practitioners need to justify their spending by proving the positive effects for the city
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the initiatives deliver. The complex relationship between activities aimed to improve
perceptions, the way such perceptions influence behaviour and the way the
behaviour again influences the city in questions, is such a complex one – that such
justification is very difficult, if at all possible, to achieve. A tendency could be
expected where city marketing focused, not on the theoretically most efficient
initiatives, but on the ones with the easiest traceable effects.
A third duality at work is the one eminent within the scientific community itself – the
duality of scientific theory, which will be elaborated to point to some ontological
differences which explains most of the difficulties in both defining, analysing,
evaluating and discussing city marketing as such. The way in which we as scientists
look towards specific issues shape the way in which we deal with them, how we
research them and ultimately which kind of answers we get our of our efforts. When
dealing with any research, it is therefore imperative to consider with which eyes we
look upon the phenomenon forming the object of study.
When a city undertakes a strategy to position itself, using for example branding or
other city marketing techniques, words such as image, perception and discourse
become inherent to the scientific mind. Also, elements such as socio-economic
composition of the city, its administration and the companies and organisations
present there are logic elements of consideration. Dealing with city marketing, one
promptly encounters the duality of the scientific theory involved. It seems that city
marketing spans between an objective paradigm where ‘hard’ factors can be
measured and benchmarked, and a hermeneutic paradigm with more ‘soft’ factors.
Different scientific schools of thinking can be applied to this ontological confusion
even though the general distinction in ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements will suffice.
At the moment, the notion that qualities can be attributed to places through
language and images embraces social-constructivism in the sense that all elements
in question are made up of social constructs; and thus created, shaped,
reproduced and perceived through language and thoughts. Considering this, it is
not surprising that a large part of the literature on city marketing primarily concerns
itself with the initiatives a city can undertake in the hope of changing its perceived
qualities. Emphasizing branding and communication as the dominating aspects of
city marketing could lead to a state where the message being communicated is
more important than the reality itself, since the reality only is experienced through
perception. In this context it should be noted that much content of the messages
cities are communicating more relates to what they want to be in the future, rather
than what they are at the moment. Other cities emphasize specific characteristics
to ‘brand’ the city by presenting themselves as ‘edgy’ or ‘trendy’, characteristics
normally associated to individuals and certainly not to places. It is evident that the
‘soft’-factors are increasingly important in city marketing both through strategies of
information and association. Where information seeks to increase knowledge of
what the city has to offer, association seek to add value to the city by aligning it
with positive, normative values such as ‘hip’, ‘green’ or ‘creative’. Communication
and branding has become increasingly crucial elements of city marketing.
However, one should not overlook the ‘hard’ factors involved. Since the first
influential publications on city marketing, the so-called ‘products’ of the city is just
as important as the promotional aspects. Improvements of infrastructure,
diminution of bureaucracy, location of events, the set-up of partnerships etc. are all
examples of initiatives that aim to improve the city’s qualities and thereby its
attractiveness. The notions of competition between cities – which will be given
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attention in the following section – refer to the existence of competitive advantages
between cities. Such advantages might be in terms of image, but just as much in
terms of measurable, quantitative and comparable elements allowing for an
analytical dissection in an objective manner. Even though the values in which
geographical locations are evaluated also are of normative nature, the geographical
location in itself is an endemic quality of any city – and can be objectively compared
against the locations of other cities in terms of for example infrastructural access to
airports, fluctuations of workforce in terms of congestion etc. Likewise, when
dealing with improvements of the physical aspects of a city, for example a redevelopment of an old harbour-area, the hard factors of a city is changed. In other
words, real changes obviously also have an influence on perceptions of a city. It is
an old observation that showing something is having a larger impact on perception
than just talking about it. The impact of ‘hard’ factors is also crucial, and no city
marketing strategy should confine itself to the ‘soft’ aspects.
In traditional marketing language, city marketing thus involves an element of
product-development; a situation where the wishes and needs of the segments of
the market which is aimed to satisfy and/or attract are used as justification for
initiatives that change the physical and practical aspects of the city – thus reshaping its attractiveness in objective terms. Without turning to essentialist
explanations, it is evident that some of the elements that make cities attractive can
be objectively observed, described, compared and analyzed and the way such
‘hard’ facts are used as foundations and targets for city marketing initiatives fits into
a more objective paradigm.
Having argued the presence of both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ factors, it seems
comprehensible to state that the theoretical and scientific ways one can approach
city marketing places it in a vacuum between two approach-ontologies: one that
focus on the socially constructed aspects and one that focus on the objectively
deductible ones (Madsen & Nielsen, 2006). In both literature and practice, examples
are plenty on how this duality has rendered city marketing problematic for both
researchers and practitioners.
The measurement of effects is a classical example where these two different ways
of thinking about city marketing clashes. One the one hand we can measure how
the aggregated behaviour of actors influence our city, on the other it is difficult to
investigate how specific initiatives influence the perceptions of individuals, and even
more complex to extract the precise role of such perceptions in actual, individual
behaviour. Furthermore, the developments observable as aggregated behaviour is
difficult to isolate from more dominant developments on which the city marketing
strategies have no influence.
2.2 Inter-urban competition – fact or fiction?
When dealing with city marketing, one should not overlook the fundamental
developments which put the concept on the agenda in the first place. Even though
one can argue that city marketing – and competition between cities in general – is
an old phenomenon traceable back to the Greek city-states, inter-urban
competition refers to more recent developments of another nature than traditional
power struggles. Both when reading policy documents arguing the need for city
marketing and when reading scientific contributions concerned with city marketing,
the concept of inter-urban competition is a frequently used, and powerful argument
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for the introduction of marketing-techniques to the management and planning of
our cities. And even though the purpose of this section more is to question the
fundamentals of city marketing, rather than presenting an attempt to answer the
question posed – it is important to consider the relevance of the fundamental ideas
upon which the argumentation for the use of city marketing is build. Additionally, it
is important to establish the link between the basic argumentation and the practice
found when looking at the actual behaviour of cities.
So called ‘foot-loose’ industries and companies are less dependent and more
mobile, and therefore can choose to locate themselves where they deem necessary
conditions to be present. In the beginning, this caused de-industrialisation because
production moved away from Western Europe, a development which almost has
drained these countries from simple production facilities, due to lower salaries in
other locations. Although this transformation has been dramatic for some cities
(Boyle & Hughes, 1994), new possibilities have arrived in the sense that the
societies are becoming knowledge-economies, where other kinds of ‘foot-loose’
activities settle due to factors such as a highly educated workforce and arbitrary
ideas such as the ability to compare the ‘quality of life’ in specific locations
(McCann, 2004; Metaxas, 2003). Especially after the Second World War, different
policies and technological developments has led to increased mobility of both
companies and citizens while tourism, information exchange and exchange of
goods are faster and more global than ever before. Some scholars refers to a flat
world, where distance does not matter anymore, and even though this certainly is a
exaggeration of dimensions, little doubt remains that locations of activities are less
fixed now than ever before.
In the same period, most West European welfare regimes have been substantially
under pressure, resulting in substantial change (Brenner, 1999, 2004). A range of
developments - often isolated to economic globalisation, though including other
developments such as demographic change - has led to a situation where former,
Keynesian redistribution policies increasingly are abolished in an ongoing process of
re-structuration. Neil Brenner terms this process the ‘re-scaling of statehood’,
referring to the changing scales on which power, responsibility, identification and
action are predominantly carried out (Brenner, 2004). Without doubt, this re-scaling
is transferring more financial and administrative freedom to the level of the city. And
with this freedom comes substantial responsibilities for securing own prosperity and
sustainable economic climate. Even though the national states to some extent
remain in control, emphasis is laid on the cities and regions to become more
competitive and independent in economic terms. Often, cities and regions are
termed the economic engines of countries, and their economic performance is seen
as important for the whole country. In the post-Keynesian rationality – resources are
invested in strong regions to make them stronger in a competitive race, while the
argument is that the spin-off will benefit the weaker regions as well (Porter, 1990). A
development often supported by the cities themselves, and powerful trends in the
idea of a ‘Europe of Regions’ – recently strengthened by the Lisbon Agenda.
The idea that cities are competing against each other is thus not a surprising one.
People tend to need spatial containers to compare different entities with each other,
and the city is increasingly becoming the scale on which this identification and
attribution of values is taking place. The city as a spatial container is often seen as
identical to administrative borders, such as provincial or municipal borders – or
more recently, new functionally determined borders; such as the ones relating to
metropolitan regions, urban regions or whatever they are labelled in their specific
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context (Deas, 2004). Although the re-scaling and re-structuration not only is a
transition between different scales, but also a completely new, and more complex,
situation of multi-level governance – where partnerships between public and private
stakeholders are increasingly shifting urban government and blue-print-planning
towards urban governance and ad-hoc planning (Healey, 1997). In the scientific
literature there is substantial arguments for both questioning what a ‘city’ is, and if
spatial containers, whether being ‘regions’ or ‘cities’ can be said to compete
against each other at all. Only companies, organisations and people inside cities
can compete against their competitors in other cities (Bristow, 2005; Jensen-Butler,
1999) – in other words: the aggregate of individual behaviour does not mean that
the aggregates of different spatial containers are competing against each other.
Though interesting, the discussion on whether cities actually can compete against
each other is not of relevance to this study, although it is interesting to question the
basis of city marketing in its own right. This might appear as a rather bold
statement, until one considers the fact that cities take proactive measures based
upon the powerful perception that inter-urban competition do exist. In this sense,
the fact that cities perceive themselves to be in a state of inter-urban competition is
enough to create some sort of competition – thus to some extent forcing cities to
play by the rules of competition.
Just as Michael Porter does on the scale of the nations in his famous book: “The
Competitive Advantage of Nations” (Porter, 1990), one can argue that there exist
competitive advantages between cities, in terms of the actors present there. The
city is an aggregated entity consisting of economic, social and cultural capital and
different physical, institutional or contextual manifestations of these different kinds
of capital. The manifestations can mean that a city holds a competitive advantage
against competing cities, although this whole concept only is valid if one starts
paying attention to specific target-groups, following the marketing principles of
market segmentation (Kotler, 1997). The conglomerate of capital and
manifestations in the city, combined with the perception of the city amongst the
decision-makers determines its attractiveness – which means that a city can
become more competitive if its attractiveness for specific activities is planned or
managed (van den Berg, Braun, & Otgar, 2003, 2004). And this is where city
marketing becomes very interesting for cities, as a tool for urban governance to
plan, manage, create and sustain competitive advantages and position the city as a
‘better’ location than alternative locations, which should be considered competitors.
So although inter-urban competition repeatedly is questioned in scientific literature
(Bristow, 2005; Riezebos, 2007), the idea that cities are competing over
companies, citizens, tourism and other markets is not likely to be fruitful to ignore.
Therefore different scholars and practitioners have attempted to apply traditional
marketing theories and practices to cities. In the next section, the components of
theoretical frameworks from the key-contributions in the scientific literature on city
marketing will be critically reviewed.
2.3 A brief review of the theoretical contributions
A number of key-contributions can be identified in the literature dealing with city
marketing. These contributions are concerned with establishing complete overviews
on what city marketing is – termed theoretical frameworks, and often they
knowingly, sketch an ideal approach to city marketing, pointing out the different
manners in which city marketing can be applied to a city. In figure 1 they have been
positioned next to each other, to provide a quick overview of the different
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components and distinctions used. Absent in the figure is “Strategische
Citymarketing” (van den Berg, Klaassen, & van der Meer, 1990), which also forms
an important contribution and includes three case cities in the development of its
framework. However, the components presented in its theoretical framework is
almost similar to the ones presented by Ashworth & Voogd (Ashworth & Voogd,
1988, 1990), and both theories originated in the Dutch context around 1990, which
render them relatively similar in their theoretical framework.
In the figure below (figure 1), a number of trends can be identified in terms of the
development of the components of the theoretical frameworks over time. The early
contributions
clearly
distinguish
‘promotional’,
‘spatial-functional’
and
‘organisational’ measures. Ashworth & Voogd, even isolate a group of ‘financial’
measures – relating to the opportunity of cities to introduce especially attractive
circumstances of financial nature (Ashworth & Voogd, 1990). Both of the early keycontributions are solidly build and conceptualised from a Dutch context (Ashworth
& Voogd, 1990; van den Berg et al., 1990). These early contributions have been,
and are still, important references for practitioners and researchers – and one can
argue that these contributions in themselves bear a responsibility in the rising
amount of cities that has flirted with city marketing since then. It is obvious that the
theoretical frameworks have been developed as an idealistic approach to city
marketing, based on knowledge on how cities work and the distinction in different
‘measures’ also maintains a clear link with policy action.
Figure 1 – Components of the theoretical frameworks from four key-contributions
Ashworth & Voogd (1990)
Hubbard & Hall (1998)
Kotler et. al. (1999)
Kavaratzis (2004)
Promotional measures
Advertising & promotion
Design
Primary communication
Spatial-functional measures
Physical redevelopment
Infrastructure
Organisational measures
Public art & civic statuary
Basic services
Landscape strategies
Infrastructure projects
Organisational structure
Behaviour of the city
Financial measures
Mega-events
Attractions
Secondary communication
Cultural regeneration
Public-private partnerships
Advertising
Public relations
Graphic design
Logo and slogan
Tertiary communication
Word of mouth
Media representations
By the author.
In the end of the 90’s, the number of publications on city marketing had exploded
due to the revitalisation strategies of especially cities in the United Kingdom; which
had employed city marketing strategies in their fight against the heavy deindustrialization following consequences of the Thatcher-reforms (Larkham & Lilley,
2003). This specific British context, is interesting to bear in mind when looking at
the components present in the framework of Hubbard & Hall (Hubbard & Hall,
1998). ‘Advertising and promotion’ is analogue to the ‘promotional measures’ of
van den Berg et. al., while ‘physical redevelopment’ would fit under the ‘spatialfunctional measures’, although we hear clearly deals with cities where relatively
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drastic changes are needed. However, the British contribution emphasizes ‘public
art and civic statuary’, ‘cultural regeneration’ and ‘mega-events’ – all initiatives that
does not fit into any specific category of measures in the earlier contributions.
Furthermore, the ‘organisational measures’ are in the British contribution narrowed
in on ‘public-private partnerships’, the functional cooperation between different
stakeholders. Although clearly conceived from another context than the Dutch
contribution, the components are applicable in a Dutch context. In fact, ‘megaevents’ and ‘public-private partnerships’ has risen to almost mantra-like status in
contemporary ideas on city marketing (Andersen & Matthiessen, 1995; Deffner &
Labrianidis, 2005; Waitt, 1999).
Entering on the scene with an influential transference of traditional marketing to
places, marketing-guru Philip Kotler introduced four key-elements in his own
framework of city marketing. ‘Design’, ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Basic services’ and
‘Attractions’ became the key categories (Kotler, 1999). Thinking in means of
traditional marketing, Kotler easily moves the attention towards a categorisation
based upon how people, companies and visitors experience a place as attractive.
While not having completely understood the true complex and dynamic nature of
cities, Kotler knew what he was doing in terms of defining the elements which in his
opinion should form the core components of any approach to marketing. He further
emphasizes the need for cities to define ‘products’, following the marketing-mix of
the four P’s: Product, Place (distribution), Promotion, Price (cost) (Kotler, 1997).
This tendency to think in traditional marketing terms can be very useful as an
exercise in theoretical and conceptual thinking, though it might prove less useful as
a recipe for practically developing strategies and initiatives that work.
Although easily criticized, Kotler did begin a transfer of traditional marketing theory
to city marketing. In this sense, not only the terminology but also the
conceptualisations and actions should be based on traditional marketing (Kotler,
1999). This trend can be followed in the more recent contributions of Mihalis
Kavaratzis, who has produced a number of interesting articles, summing up earlier
contributions into his own framework, which is build on ideas from corporative
branding literature (Kavaratzis, 2004, 2005; Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2005).
Kavaratzis takes the whole leap towards focusing purely on activities as forms of
communication. ‘Primary communication’ entails physical improvements,
infrastructure, and organisation and in general everything a city does which sends
some kind of message. ‘Secondary communication’ refers to purely promotional
activities while ‘tertiary communication’ includes the more sophisticated ‘word of
mouth’ and ‘media representations’. Kavaratzis further argues that city marketing in
fact should be about city branding – because the goal of city marketing should be
the management of a ‘brand’ (Kavaratzis, 2004), thus seeing everything as
managing of an image leaving actual focus on the essential aspects to bear
meaning only in their communicative sense.
In general, the focus of the theoretical contributions have shifted from concerning
themselves with a situation where the components consisted on different
‘measures’ a city could undertake, to full-bodied brand-management approaches
which combines sophisticated theories and applies them to the complex setting of
the city (Kavaratzis, 2004). However, one can also deduct that where the earlier
approaches are concerned with grouping factors dealing with attractiveness as
such, while the later approaches more focus on all possible aspects which play a
role in the perception of cities as attractive places. In a way, the new contributions –
heavily inspired from marketing and corporative branding – emphasizes
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communication and perception to the core elements of concern in city marketing.
Whereas this might produce a theoretically more pure marketing-conceptualisation;
it includes the danger on focusing increasingly on communication strategies; such
as logos, slogans, advertising campaigns and other short-termed initiatives; while
diminishing the focus on the establishment of ‘real’ competitive advantages.
Although the recent developments in the theoretical speculation and
conceptualisation on city marketing is interesting, they pose nothing new in terms of
rendering city marketing more operational for both researchers and practitioners.
Launching full-scale public-relation strategies are not a feasible endeavour of cities,
while their budgets are still relatively limited – and further comparison between
corporative behaviour and organisation, and the behaviour of cities in these aspects
are out of proportion in practical concerns. The following and concluding section of
this chapter, aims to make city marketing an operational concept for this study – in
which it includes observations on how cities conduct city marketing and what this
implies for both the practice and the study of city marketing.
2.4 Making city marketing operational for this study
When planning to explore how cities go about applying city marketing in their urban
governance, a more pragmatic approach to city marketing is needed. The idealistic
approaches presented in recent theory-building renders studies inconclusive and
too abstract to relate to any specific activities or strategies. Therefore, we need to
introduce distinctions for the term city marketing itself before proceeding with the
exploration of city marketing in our selected case cities.
The American Marketing Association (AMA), defines ‘marketing’ to be: “…an
organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and
delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that
benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” (AMA, 2007). If we translate this to
cities, the definition presented in the section on terminology (2.3) still holds suffice,
in the sense that a shift from supply- to demand-side urban governance implies
exactly this kind of rational thinking about city marketing as well. The interesting
emphasis on ‘marketing’ as an ‘organizational function’ can with benefit be
translated onto the city (van den Berg & Braun, 1999). The authorities of the city,
often resembling the municipal government are the organizational body who
possess the responsibility of the city as such and therefore also its marketing
strategies. However, introducing the organizational aspects as important in the
operationalization of city marketing does not solve the problem of distinguishing
which specific behaviour of a city should be investigated if one is interested in
exploring city marketing in practice.
Contemporary urban governance includes a multitude of different stakeholders and
actors, involved in complicated and intertwined partnerships and collectively sharing
competencies (Daniels, 1995; Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2007). Following the ideas
that the aggregated behaviour of a city and all its stakeholders has an impact on
the attractiveness of the city might be logic, though it renders a pragmatic
approach to city marketing impossible to overlook, implement and/or study. A lot of
different stakeholders might have interest in the heightening of their city’s
attractiveness, and such stakeholders are not likely to neither share target-groups
nor agree to the means chosen or to the ambitions of the municipal authorities as
such. The organisational capacity of a city is therefore a crucial criterion for success
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(van den Berg & Braun, 1999), allowing the responsible authorities to combine
forces with stakeholders from the private and non-governmental sectors. Such
organizational streamlining means compromises and strategic choices made in
close cooperation with the involved stakeholders. By introducing this emphasis on
the organizational aspects involved with city marketing, an operational definition can
be made: City marketing, in operational terms, refers to the conscious attempts to
position a city, and increase the city’s competitive advantage in relation to
competing cities – with the explicit purpose of fulfilling specific ambitions of gaining
shares of specific segments of the market through strategic initiatives. The most
important word to notice in this operational definition is the word “conscious”.
Contrary to the theoretical frameworks who either include all possible measures a
city can undertake, or all the possible elements which influences how cities are
perceived – this operational definition focus on what cities consciously undertake as
part of a city marketing based set of initiatives and strategies with the specific
purpose of increasing their attractiveness for specific target-groups.
Considering the research questions sought answered in this study, we can safely
limit our interest in this way; thus excluding the complex ways in which cities are
perceived and zooming in on the way cities actively try to employ city marketing.
Embracing the fundamental reasoning behind city marketing, the knowledge on
how marketing-theory have been translated to the setting of the city, and the
emphasis on competitiveness – it is interesting to see what cities do, and which
reasoning they use to justify their application of city marketing. Bearing these things
in mind, one can expect cities to employ city marketing as a function of marketoriented thinking and react more or less rational in relation to potential competition
etc. By structurally exploring our three cases we can extract the relationship
between the cities’ positions, their ambitions and visions, their implementation and
organisation, and their actual strategies – and in this way explore to what extent
cities are applying city marketing in a manner which logically fits the expectations
one should have in view of their initial position in an urban system.
Traditionally city marketing is concerned with three major target-groups; citizens,
visitors/tourists and companies. However, distinctions are often made between
internal and external target-groups and following the selectiveness of traditional
marketing much more specific target-groups are created. Visitors can be divided
into international tourists, leisure tourists, business tourists and even people from
the hinterland just stopping by to do some shopping etc. The possibilities are many,
and even though it is not expected that the cities chosen for this study will be so
specific in their segmentation-techniques, they are likely to emphasize different
target-groups in their ambitions and initiatives. Throughout the exploration of these
three cases the trinity of citizens, visitors/tourists and companies has been used as
a guideline to determine which of the overall target-group a specific ambition or
initiative was aimed at. A very general typology of initiatives, based on the targetgroup they are directed towards, is therefore part of our operationalization of city
marketing.
2.5 Geographical reasoning and theoretical expectations
When concerned with city marketing from a geographical perspective, a number of
theoretical expectations can be made in relation to the application of city marketing
to middle-sized cities in particular. Acknowledging the impact of the geographical
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setting on the perceived preconditions for strategic use of city marketing, one can
argue the following statements are likely to apply to middle-sized cities:
First, initiatives and strategies in the traditional aspects of urban governance are
increasingly organised after a more or less functional approach, and therefore it is
feasible to expect that the organisation of city marketing will show some traits of
multi-level and mixed-level governance (cf. Deas, 2004). In other words, when cities
apply city marketing a non-standard organisational practice is likely to be observed.
However, complicating this the need to maintain a strict link between the different
actors suggest a relatively centralistic form of organisation, where city marketing
becomes more integrated in the general governance-structure of the city (van den
Berg & Braun, 1999; van den Berg et al., 2003).
Second, the notion of marketing logically refers to competition and competition. It is
logic to expect cities to focus strongly on competition, because the whole
fundamental rationale behind applying city marketing in the first place is the
perception of increased inter-urban competition (cf. 2.2). Included in such a focus
on competition, an identification of both the market segments and the potential
competitors are expected to be relatively important in the decision-making.
Following the same logic, the need to distinguish or position itself in relation to such
potential competitors are usually elements of marketing-based approaches (Kotler,
1997). Consequently, cities are likely to determine their strengths in relation to other
cities and use these strengths as important elements in their marketing-strategies.
Likewise, they are likely to try and avoid null-competition through specialization and
selectiveness in the initiatives directed to external target-groups, while being
concerned with directing initiatives on a broader scale towards the internal targetgroups to keep them attached to the city.
Third and last, the notion of scalar differences is an important one, which especially
applies to middle-sized cities. Finding themselves in an urban hierarchy that
contains cities of dominant and influence, the middle-sized city is likely to make a
scalar distinction in its ambitions, thereby directing its initiatives towards different
target-groups at different scales. Such strategically chosen initiatives follows a logic
where the middle-sized city realistically assets the market-segments of interest and
judges it chances of success in competing for these market-segments with other
cities. Logically, this should result in cooperation on some issues and competition
on other cities – because no-one is accustomed to invest resources in initiatives
that are very unlikely to produce positive results. The same reasoning suggests
cooperation with dominant cities and neighbouring cities when mutual benefits are
present for both parties. Again, a situation should exist where neighbouring cities
are labelled ‘partners’ in some aspects and ‘rivals’ in others.
From the geographic approach, the application of marketing to cities includes the
traditional realism and pragmatism of both scalar- and functional differentiation. In
the next chapter, the methodology of this study will be presented with the general
aim of this study. The outcome of the explorative cases described in chapters 4, 5
and 6 will probably allow some conclusions to be drawn on the expectations posed
in this section.
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3. Methodology
The methodology developed for this research can unfortunately not build upon
methodologies developed in former studies – since such studies are not
represented in the scientific literature. While this might represent a weakness in the
ability to assert the quality of this study, it also underlines the still mostly uncharted
territory of the application and content of city marketing strategies in contemporary
urban governance. The methodological approach that has been devised for the
completion of this study should therefore be seen as an explorative venture where
an attempt is made to make the phenomenon of city marketing researchable using
a methodological mix of both objects of study and ways of dealing with the
collection of empirical data.
In this chapter, the methodology, the terminology, the concepts and the objects of
study are presented, discussed and criticized. The chapter is intuitively build-up:
After the establishment of what the research wants to achieve (3.1), the positioning
of the research (3.2), the specification of terms and concepts (3.3) – the
methodological approach to the research questions will be presented and
discussed (3.4). The general methodology as will be discussed later in detail, use a
mix of literature study, case-studies and document studies of both advisory reports
from a consultancy bureau, and policy-documents from the authorities of the three
cities in question. These different desktop-methods are combined with a total of six
conducted key-informant interviews, to nuance the outcome of the documentstudies. The methodology will be summarized and critically reviewed to conclude
this chapter (3.5).
3.1 Research Goal and Research Questions
As the introduction briefly touched (chapter 1), the goal of this research is to explore
and analyze to what extent middle-sized cities’ city marketing strategies are
influenced by the presence of nearby cities. To help achieve this goal, a number of
research questions have been conceived to guide and structure the research. The
cumulative answer to these questions will allow conclusions to be drawn on how
city marketing strategies are implemented to middle-sized cities in a general sense;
particularly in terms of the role nearby cities possibly play in the forming of
ambitions, visions and strategies. The four research questions will be presented and
elaborated one by one, followed by discussions of their implications for the
research and the methodology used.
Question 1: What should be understood by “city marketing”, and how do the term
and the context in which it is manifested apply to the context of Dutch, middle-sized
cities?
This first research question is already partly answered in the section on terminology
and the theoretical chapter on city marketing (3.3 and 2), but the question does not
only refer to the definition of a terminology: the discrepancy between what
practitioners and scientific scholars think city marketing means – or should mean
need to be distinguished. Furthermore, the question expresses the need to
establish a link between the concepts and the context in which they become
situated. Since this study is concerned with middle-sized cities in the Netherlands,
the concepts need to be defined and related to the specific context of the
Netherlands. Such specific context includes the urban system of the country, the
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territorial-administrative system and the traditional way of dealing with urban
management and planning in the country. For the purpose of this study, the
emphasis lays in the definition of the core concepts and the way in which they are
applicable.
To reach a reasonable answer to this first research question – which helps forming
the theoretical framework and general approach to our case-studies – this study
relies on a critical literature review which will compare different developments within
the scientific literature on city marketing to reach a theoretical framework. Such
framework is necessary to establish to guide the case-studies and make the results
directly interpretational and comparable.
Question 2: Which different approaches to city marketing are used in the practice of
city marketing in middle-sized, Dutch cities and to what extent does such variations
stem from different ambitions, visions and strategies?
2. a: Which ambitions and visions are represented?
2. b: Which strategies have been devised, and with which purposes?
2. c: What are the contents of the initiatives?
2. d: How are the city marketing organized?
It seems quite likely that cities are implementing tailor-made strategies, both when
looking at the theoretical contributions in the scientific body of literature and
considering the intrinsic feature that every city is different. The literature poses many
different views on what city marketing is and even though the basic ideas are of
rather similar nature, the divergences are likely to have an impact on the practical
application of city marketing. It is factual that different approaches to city marketing
co-exist. Besides the issue on the actual meaning of the concept – which were
given attention in the previous research question - every city represents a unique
entity with a particular historical, political, economic and social context. This poses
different challenges to the city, due to the different position in which the city find
itself. Any city has a unique composition of stakeholders, agents and has developed
a specific code-of-conduct throughout the years. A city can be seen as a container
which includes years and years of accumulated capital and actions, and even
though many things can be observed and described on a general level, city
marketing is not likely to be fruitfully enforced by following a generalized formula or
by the copying of best-practices from cities abroad. For such practice to be
meaningful, city marketing is too complex – if one defines it to need implementation
in the present governance-structures in any particular place and setting. In one city,
the complex set-up of a broadly inclusive public-partnership might be a good
solution – while another city might benefit more from a small task-force within the
municipal administration.
The ambitions and visions of a city planning to employ city marketing tools in its
governance are in this study seen to play a crucial role. As elaborated in the
previous chapter (2.), and hinted above, the development a city hopes to achieve
partially by the use of city marketing strategies is crucial for the actual composition
of these strategies, the content of actual initiatives and the organisation which are
put in place. When exploring the way a city use city marketing, it is therefore
necessary to asset which ambitions and visions the city has. In other words, it is of
outmost importance to explore what a city want to achieve, before analyzing
whether there is a realistic relation between these goals and the strategies enforced
to achieve them. Also, the content of the initiatives devised to reach specific
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developments must be given attention – as well as the organisation of these
initiatives. In other words, both the means and the ends should be given attention
when one aims to asset the application of city marketing. Even though this might
seem incredibly logic, this has not been the most prominent practice in most
scientific contributions as well as in most cities’ approach to city marketing
somehow has lacked reflection on these obvious relationships.
Albeit one might be expecting every city to have its own approach to city marketing,
it still seems reasonable to assume that cities with comparable ambitions might
enforce similar strategies. The question further, understandably suggest that there
might exist a link between what goals a city want to achieve, what it does and how
the organisation of the initiatives become manifested. Whereas the rational logic of
this cause-effect chain is clear, very little empirical research have compared the
relationship between cities positions, their ambitions and the way in which they
implement city marketing as a tool to reach their goals. The empirical part of this
study is devised to the observation and exploration of these relationships; to
uncover whether the rational thought are reflected in the real practice or not. To
achieve this (as well as the following two research questions), three case-studies
has been carried out, including the study of policy-documents, advisory reports, a
limited number of key-informant interviews and an assessment of the position of the
case-cities in an urban system; along with some observations on benchmarks and
‘real’-facts relating to the position of the case-cities.
Question 3: To what extent does the proximity of other cities influence the city
marketing approach for middle-sized cities in the Netherlands?
Regardless of ones definition of city marketing, the rational justification of the usage
of city marketing in contemporary urban governance is closely linked with the idea
of inter-urban competition and the existence of competitive advantages between
places. In this sense, it becomes important to establish whether the rational
foundations of city marketing are reflected in the practice. Following these
doctrines, the large amount of middle-sized cities in the Netherlands establishes a
very tight competitive field. In this sense, if anywhere, the identification of nearby
cities as potential competitors are likely to play a prominent role in the Netherlands
– as a direct result of the competition between cities one might expect here. To test
the linkage between the rationality behind our conceptual and theoretical
understanding of city marketing and the reality to which it is applied – this question
suggest to look at the role nearby cities play in the shaping of a city’s marketing
approach, its ambitions, visions and the strategies it employ.
Question 4: Which relationship, if any, exists between a city’s position in an urban
hierarchy and its approach to city marketing strategies?
Being the last of our four research questions, this question tries to draw some
lessons on the previous questions. The theoretical and conceptual understanding of
what city marketing is, the empirical observations on the way it is applied in Dutch,
middle-sized cities and the specific exploration on the relationship between the
basic ideas and the actual applications can be linked to the position of a city in an
urban network. The geographical location of a city is an inherent feature of this
specific place, and while many companies, organisations, events and citizens are
becoming more foot-loose, cities are fixed locations in the strictest meaning of the
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word. When considering the same logic of competitiveness as in the previous
research question, the qualities of any city is completely dependent on the
perceived attractiveness of the specific space which is referred to as the city and its
region. This perceived attractiveness can both be bound to objective and subjective
features and both can be the target of city marketing initiatives. However, the fixed
location of a city and the fixed location of nearby cities represent features of an
urban system which can not easily be influenced. The competitive field means that
any city has a specific position inside an urban system. This initially determines the
realism of the ambitions and visions a city might have. The geographical dimension
of this urban system gains weight when one considers the relationship between a
city’s location and its position in relation to other cities. This fourth and final
research question seeks to uncover whether the practice of city marketing relates
to the difference between location and position. In other words: whether the
approaches to city marketing include a relational aspect which takes external
factors into account, following the same consequential lines of thought which
provide the basic assumption for city marketing: the inter-urban competition.
Together, these four research questions are guiding the research, and even though
they are not considered or answered in a strict chronological way they have
provided the structure of the study as well. The methodology have been devised to
provide answers to these questions; and the last three questions are all covered by
the case-studies and the following critical comparison and discussion of the
empirical observations made in the three cases. From the summary of the casestudies, a generalization will be provided which points to interesting aspects of the
application of city marketing to middle-sized cities in the Netherlands – but also
states important observations of city marketing in general terms.
The different methodological approaches used in this study will be elaborated in
detail later in this chapter (3.4). Before delving into the specific methodological
choices made for this study, it seems useful to briefly position this study in relation
to existing empirical studies in the topic (3.2) and make some distinctions on the
terminology of this thesis (3.3).
3.2 Positioning this study
In general, empirical studies dealing with city marketing are not frequent. Most
studies are concerned with single case-studies on how a specific city is
implementing event- or sports-management, public-private partnerships or other
single-element issues. Comparative studies are rare and the ones that exist aim to
compare large cities, across national borders and to some extent across the
borders of comparability itself. The total amount of studies relating to city marketing
is limited, which has the consequence that most studies are aiming on the large
cities. Middle-sized cities are not given much attention, and to our knowledge there
is no comparative study of middle-sized cities which aim to explore and analyze
how they implement city marketing. In this sense, this study is not only of
explorative nature because of the lack of existing theory – but also lacks the
possibility of building upon earlier studies into the topic.
The concepts involved with city marketing are complex, and until now the interest in
city marketing from the scientific community has mostly been centred around the
theoretical speculations on the transfer or translation of marketing-theory, and
commoditisation of cities as ‘products’. However, city marketing experiences a
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rising interest from the responsible authorities as a result of further developments in
the more or less perceived state of inter-urban competition. In the Netherlands, a
substantial amount of cities have already launched city marketing related
programmes and strategies – and they are now seeking to improve their
approaches and streamline their initiatives and organisations. Furthermore, the
middle-sized cities are massively entering the scene, asking for advice on how to
use city marketing as a way of increasing their possibilities.
This study humbly attempts to uncover city marketing as a phenomenon in relation
to middle-sized cities. Additionally, the study tries to make the links between 1) a
city’s ambitions and visions, and the strategies it chooses – and 2) the position of a
city in an urban hierarchy and the approach to city marketing it follows. In this way,
this study represents an initial attempt to reach a more sophisticated theoretical
framework in relation to middle-sized cities and their application of city marketing.
Logically, it has an explorative nature which inevitable results in propositions for
further research into this topic.
3.3 Terminology and distinctions
As should be clear by now, city marketing borrows a lot of its concepts and
terminology from traditional marketing. In many ways, this borrowing makes a lot of
sense – since the ruling discourse on economy emphasises competitiveness and
entrepreneurialism, as described particular in the case of cities by David Harvey in
his influential article ”From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation
in urban governance in late capitalism” (Harvey, 1989). However, one should not
blindly transfer the concepts from marketing to city marketing, which easily can be
concluded from the many problems researchers and practitioners alike have
suffered when trying to make a ‘product’ of a city. Even though the concepts from
traditional marketing are helpful tools for thinking conceptually about city marketing,
the concepts might include connotation on conduct, or in other words: the use of
terms from traditional marketing should not lead to non-reflective ideas on how to
go about city marketing in practice. In this section, we shortly treat the different
terms that repeatedly is used in this thesis. The analogue terms and concepts from
traditional marketing will be used in this thesis because no intuitively useful
alternatives exists, and because it seems meaningless to invent a whole different
set of concepts of terms, when the similarities between the meaning of specific
terms in traditional marketing and city marketing are larger than the differences. It is
important to note that this section is concerned with the connotation of the terms
used, and not with the content attributed to the terms, even though this can not be
evaded from the terminological discussion. The actual contents will be given
attention in chapter 3, which seeks to answer the first of our four research
questions. This section, however, aims to establish a situation where the reader and
the writer are in line with the use of the key-concepts, the terminology used and the
connotation attributed to the terms in the context of this study.
The concept and term of city marketing itself is the logical place to start. In this
thesis, a whole chapter (chapter 2) is concerned with defining and describing what
city marketing is – because it makes little sense to conduct an empirical study
without having a clear idea of a theoretical framework of reference, and such
framework is yet to be devised in a consistent form in our theoretical body of
knowledge. The term has developed into a container-term, not specifically meaning
anything but open for different attribution of content in different situations,
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depending on who is using it and why. The issue is analogue to the development
with traditional marketing. Most people directly think of commercials and ‘selling’
when confronted with ‘marketing’ as a term. However, marketing refers to studies
and methods which are concerned with the relationship between products and
customers. Such products do not have to be clearly defined ‘things’ but can be of
quite ambiguous nature; such as services or ‘brands’. This is even more true for city
marketing, where the use of ‘products’ more illustrates a specific helpful way of
thinking, rather than a practically applicable code of conduct. Another
terminological analogue between traditional marketing and city marketing relates to
the fact that marketing also is concerned about the development of products and
services. In other words, the emphasis is not on selling but on administering a
relation between what a company or an organisation (or city) has to offer and the
specific ‘target-groups’, as segments of a broader market. One can thus easily
include ‘product-development’ to the borrowed terms in the sense that also cities
need to improve what they have to offer if they want to profit from marketingapproaches.
A distinction which should be made in this context is the one between city
marketing and city branding. Whereas these two terms often are confusingly used
synonymously – this terminological confusion is relatively easy to solve. Branding
logically refers to the creation of a brand, a symbol of a specific set of values and
connotations often relating to the name of a company or organisations, and often
visually expressed in a logo and a slogan. From corporative branding, interesting
lessons can be learned in relation to city branding. For example, a corporate brand
can be a general symbol of quality and value and co-exist with sub-brands directed
towards specific target-groups. In terms of city marketing, a brand refers to the
specific image of a city, which only exists in a state of subjective perception. The
different strategies and initiatives that are concerned with changing the image of a
city entail elements of city branding. And although city branding is a logic
component of city marketing, the latter concept is broader and refers to a change
of mind – a conceptualisation of a marketing-oriented approach to urban
governance. When Kavaratzis wrote his article with the intriguing title: “From city
marketing to city branding” (Kavaratzis, 2004), he probably wanted to emphasize
the communicative elements involved in city marketing by stressing the importance
of using the image or identity of a city in its competitive advantage and unique
qualities. However, where city branding refers to communication and promotion –
city marketing also include real changes in services, planning and administration.
The distinction is important to make for a number of reasons wherefrom two shall
be elaborated: First, an increasing number of cities want to include more than pure
promotional measures as parts of their city marketing. A need and concern for
content, product-development and target-group segmentation asks for other
solutions than the ones inherently included in a promotional approach. Second, if a
city aims for a specific positive development it seems naïve to focus solely on
improvement of reputation and perceived quality. Even though it is difficult not to
agree with the statement from Kavaratzis (quoted on the first page of this thesis):
“The beginning lies in the realisation that all encounters with the city takes place
through perception” (Kavaratzis, 2004) - perception is not solely dependent on
subjective attributions of meaning and experiences of quality, it also holds relation
to the more objective elements.
And even though one rightfully can argue that the strategic improvement of for
example infrastructure is done as a part of a branding-strategy (as Kavaratzis
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undoubtedly will), the difference in connotation between city branding and city
marketing is an important reason to distinguish between the two terms: When a city
enforces city branding, it wants to approach a problem of a bad or missing image –
an achievement which can be reached through communicative/pr-strategies and
the creative innovation of events and other media related strategies. When a city
aims towards city marketing, branding often are one of the key elements, though a
more integrated approach to the marketing toolbox often is implied. More than
anything: city marketing refers to a variable set of tools, which can be applied to
cities in the quest to improve or maintain a competitive position in a (perceived)
state of inter-urban competition. Analogue to traditional marketing, city marketing is
not confined to promotional activities. It represents a customer- and marketoriented approach to urban governance, -management, –policy and –planning.
Such an approach necessitates the strategic choice of specific target-groups for
policy actions. Target-groups are used to indicate that city marketing is not about
promotion in its simplest sense, but refers to segmentation-techniques where
responsible, reflected and considered choices are made.
An additional set of terms which needs precision is the use of ‘product’ and
‘customer’ in relation to city marketing. A lot of energy has been put into the
definition of the products of cities. The marketing guru Philip Kotler transferred
nearly all marketing terms to the scene of the city and argued that cities should
define the products they wanted to sell before a specific strategy could be
developed (Kotler, 1999). Even though the logic is stunning, a city is not a company
and the adoption of terms such as ‘product’ or ‘consumer’ needs done with due
carefulness. In a traditional product-chain there are a clear distinction between the
producer, the product and the consumer. When concerned with cities one should
consider which kind of products one can identify, who produces these products,
who consumes them and who are selling them. Although this might be an
interesting exercise for people concerned with the formulation of city marketing
strategies, it holds little practical use. A city’s only product is its geographical
location, which attractiveness is determined by a huge amount of different variables
including very few of which the city authorities easily can change or influence. The
city as an aggregated entity, consisting of many citizens, companies and containing
historical, cultural, social and economic capital, which develops and changes over
time. All actors and stakeholders within the city (citizens, companies, organisations
etc.) are continuously reproducing and using the city – which makes them
‘prosumers’ (a term uniting producer and consumer). In this sense, the productchain is complex and intertwined with all the different prosumers in the city. Even
tourists are prosumers in the sense that they redefine the city as a tourist
destination when they visit – thereby illustrating the attractiveness of the city simply
be having chosen it as destination. The use of terms such as products, consumers,
prosumers etc. should be taken as thought-categories which unite complex
relations and label them for easy conceptualisation. It seems of low importance to
invest a lot of time and energy in the clear definition of products which themselves
are so complex that they cannot be clearly separated from other products. Kotler
and his colleagues present us with interesting and inspired reading but fail to
adequately translate the traditional marketing concepts to the scene of the city.
Another set of terms which already have been, and further will be, used frequently
in this thesis consists of ‘competition’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘competitive advantage’,
‘inter-urban competition’ and ‘competitive field’. Obviously, these terms all refer to
the basic idea that cities experience a state of competition. ‘Competitiveness’ refer
to the competitive strength, whereas ‘competitive advantage’ conceptualise that
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specific qualities cause such strength. “Inter-urban competition” simply means the
idea that cities are competing against each other, an idea which has been
repeatedly questioned but nevertheless seems to maintain its hold of the
practitioners, thus rendering it a phenomenon of debate in itself. The concept of a
‘competitive field’ refers to a spatial plane whereon different actors (cities) are
competing. A ‘tight’ competitive field means that there are many actors, which
logically should result in increased competition between the actors present in the
competitive field.
The final term to be lent attention before concluding this section on terminology and
distinctions is the definition of ‘middle-sized cities’ used in this study. It goes to
reason that ‘middle-sized’ refer to a segment of cities which does not include the
largest or smallest cities in a given setting. Where exactly to make this distinction is
somewhat troublesome and very context-specific. However, a relatively easy
distinction can be made in terms of city marketing. When a city is too small to
reasonably expect it to represent a broad approach to city marketing (i.e. more than
mere tourist-aimed promotion) it is not susceptible to this kind of study. In the other
end of the spectrum it becomes more difficult to choose demarcation criteria. Yet,
the idea of this study also included the relationship between the city marketing
strategies of cities and neighbouring cities, and to fulfil this end it is preferable to
have neighbouring cities of both larger and smaller size than the group of cities
given the attention in this study. In this study, firmly positioned within a Dutch
context, cities than contain between 100.000 and 200.000 inhabitants where
considered. Although the actual size of this category of cities is not comparable to
what would qualify for ‘middle-sized cities’ in many other countries – the basic
challenges and institutional structures faced by cities of this size are likely to be
comparable from setting to setting.
3.4 The methodological elements
After having established the key concepts used in this thesis, the different
methodological elements of the study will be elaborated in the following sections.
The methodological considerations of each of the specific elements will be
presented. From the literature study (3.4.1) providing the theoretical and conceptual
basis of this study – over the selection of case-cities (3.4.2), the study of advisory
reports and policy documents (3.4.3) – to the use of key-informants (3.4.4); all
aspects will be briefly discussed before presenting a criticism of the general
methodological approach will conclude the chapter (3.5).
In figure 2 (next page), an overview of the methodological elements and approach is
illustrated. The overview shows that the different elements are analyzed for each
case along with a general summary linking up the empirical observations made in
the three selected cities with the theoretical understanding of city marketing. The
overview of the methodological elements does not represent the composition of the
chapters dealing with the three case studies; these chapters are structured in
relation to the research questions to provide a more intuitive read.
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Figure 2 – Overview of the methodological approach
Literature study
Operational concept
Advisory reports
Policy documents
Key-informant interviews
Almere
Amersfoort
Leiden
Observations
Observations
Observations
Analysis
Analysis
Analysis
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
City marketing 'State-of-the-art' in the Netherlands
Empery to theory (feedback)
Conclusion
By the author.
3.4.1 The literature study
As in any study on this level, one is expected to establish a consistent framework of
reference from the existing literature on the topic, and related issues. With city
marketing, this has been a relatively simple endeavour since the concept first got
founded in practice and academics two decades ago. A specific search on the
scientific journal directory of SCOPUS only reveals 31 contributions (SCOPUS,
2007), whereas a manual search including relating topics and more in-depth search
through references amounts to around 100 contributions in the form of articles in
scientific peer-reviewed journals or books. Much of this literature concerns itself
with partial aspects of city marketing, such as event-management, the impact of
events on a city’s image etc. The total body of literature is relatively humble and
was easily covered and studied before choosing which “gap” to aim to cover with
the work with this thesis. The limited amount of literature is partly due to the
ambiguousness of the concepts of city marketing (cf. 3.3), partly due to the fact
that even though the promotion of places as locations for specific activities is no
new phenomenon (S. V. Ward, 1998), city marketing as such first gained specific
interest from scientific scholars in the beginning of the 80’s (Ashworth & Voogd,
1988).
The preparation of this study has been ongoing for half a year, a time span
sufficient to establish a consistent overview of the available literature and identify the
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key-contributions for use in theoretical discussions and to determine which aspects
to look into for empirical observations. Furthermore, the literature pointed out the
need for exactly the kind of studies which this study is an explorative attempt to
conduct. Parts of the literature have only been published in Dutch (because the
term ‘city marketing’ originated in the Netherlands), whereas the main part of the
most important contributions is available in English. Although, an extended literature
has formed the basis of this study and are used in defining a theoretical framework,
no earlier methodologies have been developed which the present study can build
on in terms of its empirical data collection. This has earlier been stated in the
positioning of this study as an explorative one (cf. 3.2).
The most important theoretical contributions has been identified as the “Strategic
City Marketing” (van den Berg et al., 1990), “Selling the City: Marketing Approaches
in Public Sector Planning” (Ashworth & Voogd, 1990), “Marketing Places Europe”
(Kotler, 1999) and the more recent article “From city marketing to city branding”
(Kavaratzis, 2004), which sums up the previous main contributions and attempts
the creation of a more consistent framework. These important contributions share
their attempt to establish a theoretical overview of the components of city
marketing, though they rarely use empirical observations to deduct or qualify their
chosen components. Although the attempts vary in terms of to what extent they are
adapted, or translated from traditional marketing to city marketing, and although the
quality of the theoretical argumentation sometimes take the form of speculations on
ideal approaches – these contributions form the basic conceptualisation of city
marketing as a possible tool-box for urban governance and planning.
Besides the core-contributions mentioned above, an extensive amount of scientific
articles, reports and white papers have been consulted and studied to identify and
qualify the components of a theoretical framework for this study. Furthermore, the
basic foundations of this study has been assessed using contributions such as
literature on the re-scaling of statehood and the new challenges for urban
governance which can be seen as a result of such developments (Brenner, 1999,
2004; Harvey, 1989; Kearns & Paddison, 2000; K. Ward, 2003). Also the traditional
marketing-theory has been consulted in the form of Philip Kotler’s “Marketing
Management” (Kotler, 1997) as well as the conceptualisation of competition has
been qualified using the “The Competitive Advantage of Nations” (Porter, 1990)
along with more critical views on the competitiveness-regime (Bristow, 2005; Cox,
1995; Jessop, 1998b; Justman, Thisse, & van Ypersele, 2005; Stewart, 1996) –
followed by general critique on the neo-liberal discourse below the rising
importance of ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘competition’ in public sector institutions
(Syngedouw, Moulaert, & Rodriguez).
The literature study has greatly influenced the research goal of this study as well as
the content of the previous chapter (2) which aims to identify what city marketing is;
and make the concept operational for this study, while presenting some
expectations based on the theoretical understanding behind city marketing.
However, for the set-up of the methodology itself, the available literature has been
of very limited use, which once again underlines the necessity for more empirical
studies into the application of city marketing.
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3.4.2 The selection of case-cities
As mentioned in the section dealing with terminology and distinctions (3.3), our
initial criteria for the selection of case cities was that they belonged to a group of
cities which could be considered ‘middle-sized’ in relation to their size and position
in an urban hierarchy or system. Although a more substantial amount of cases
would have been preferred, the practical circumstances and time available for this
research allowed for the selection of three cases.
In the Netherlands, a number of categories defining cities exist. One such category
is the “G4”, representing the four largest cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The
Hague and Utrecht. Another, less known category is the “G27” which (not
surprisingly) contains 27 middle-sized cities in the Netherlands (G27, 2007). For the
purpose of answering all four research questions; cities was needed who did not
have a dominant position in the urban hierarchy, who did represent a middle-sized
entity in terms of population and who did lay in the vicinity of other cities of both
smaller and larger size. These selection criteria should be qualified with the extra
criteria that advisory reports and policy documents should be available for study –
which further limited the possible choices. As will be elaborated in the next section
the choice was further limited to cities which had received advice from a specific
consultancy bureau – Bureau Berenschot, which consider itself market-leader in
terms of city marketing in the Benelux region (Berenschot, 2007).
Figure 3 - The three selected cases and the urban system of the Netherlands
By the author, based on data from (CBS, 2006)
From the G27-cities, the Amersfoort and Leiden was selected, and not belonging to
any of these categories; Almere was selected (cf. figure 3). The detailed position
and composition of these cities will be analysed at the beginning of each casestudy (respectively chapters 4, 5 and 6). In this context, however, it should be noted
that all three case-cities are located in the vicinity of larger cities, other middle-sized
cities and smaller cities. Where Almere is situated in the immediate vicinity of
Amsterdam, Amersfoort is situated by Utrecht and Leiden in the very middle of the
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Randstad – closest to The Hague, but also within reach of Amsterdam (to the
North) and Rotterdam (to the South). The three cities are middle-sized within a
Dutch context, and while Leiden contain 118.000 inhabitants, Amersfoort 136.000
and Almere around 178.000, they are situated in an area containing more than 7
million inhabitants (CBS, 2006). This area, known as the Randstad (even though
Amersfoort in fact is not included in this figure) – and represent one of the most
dense areas of Europe in terms of population (Nota Ruimte, 2006). Furthermore,
contrary to other large European urban areas such as London, Paris or Berlin –
nearly every city in this area has maintained an own identity (G27, 2007). And
although one can argue that the whole western part of the Netherlands form one
functionally integrated, polycentric urban area (Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2004) –
the distinct identification of individual cities poses a serious challenge for identitybuilding and image-management, which might explain why city marketing is
especially prominent in Dutch cities.
The reader is invited to refer to the maps provided in Appendix A, for a
geographical map offering an overview of the three cities and their respective
surroundings. These appendixes are useful throughout the entire thesis.
Another interesting feature of our three case cities is that even though they are all
situated within the same general territorial-administrative context (the Netherlands),
they are very different in terms of development history and opportunity. Almere is a
new city with a large area for future development, Amersfoort is a city nearing the
end of its expansion possibilities and Leiden is a city that does not have any
expansion possibilities left. Among other reasons, this is promising for the purpose
of this study because it suggests that there will be differences in the approach to
city marketing chosen in the three cities. Such difference can be based on
difference in ambitions and visions but also on the perceived possibilities in relation
to the position in an urban hierarchy, own possibilities, and policies. In this way, our
three case cities can contribute to improve our theoretical understanding on how
city marketing becomes applied to contemporary urban governance.
3.4.3 The study of advisory reports and policy documents
As mentioned in the previous section, one of the criteria for selection of case cities
to this study was the existence of factual initiatives in terms of city marketing, and
the existence of available, advisory reports. This approach was chosen because it
seemed pointless to conduct extensive studies in terms of the ambitions, visions
and chosen strategies if such findings could be extracted from research (although
not scientific) carried out by consultancy bureaus. Doing this rendered the study
feasible in terms of practical concerns and allowed the focus of the explorative and
analytical efforts to remain on the link between the elements and city marketing,
rather than in defining the elements themselves.
Since advisory reports was seen as an opportunistic element of the methodological
approach, it was reasonable to select reports from the same consultancy bureau to
refrain from lending attention to the inevitable differences in the approach, the use
of reports from different consultancies would result in. Berenschot had in the last
couple of years delivered a number of advisory reports for G27-cities, as well as the
plan for Amsterdam – and the consistent nature of the approach to city marketing
advice followed by this consultancy bureau made it an ideal set of materials.
Almere, Amersfoort and Leiden all had recently received advisory reports from
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Berenschot. These reports were made available for study, and have in all three
cases been used in the shaping of ambitions, visions and strategies of the cities in
question. Also, the reports contained the results of SWOT-analysis (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and a sufficient amount of observations
based on interviews with key-informants from the cities in questions. Although,
these advisory reports do not conform to scientific standards, they can still be seen
as valuable documents from which important information can be extracted. Further,
they are proof that the city authorities and stakeholder-organisations are actively
considering their city marketing strategies, which is promising in the sense that
policy documents from such cities are more likely to contain reflected ideas and
opinions rather than opportunistic naivety.
While the advisory reports cover interesting aspects of the analytical basis for
policy-decisions, the actual policy-documents must be seen as the true indicative
outcomes of the ambitions and visions in the form of organisation and goals to be
reached through strategic intervention. Therefore, this study has included policydocuments related to city marketing for the three cities as important study objects.
Policy-documents representing economic development plans, stakeholder
covenants, assessment of existing activities etc. are included in the analysis to the
extent that they add light to interesting aspects of city marketing.
The amount of relevant policy documents inevitably vary from city to city, and it
would be naïve to expect political and managerial materials to contain sufficient
information to be able to for example extract knowledge about how the city in
question relates to its neighbouring cities and region. Such documents are in their
nature often very introvert, which is why the documents dealing with the city in
relation to outer entities have been given most attention in the study of policy
documents. Further, the specific interest in how cities relate their strategies to their
position in a competitive field – and employ city marketing to this end – required the
content of policy documents to be qualified by a sample of interviews; allowing for
in-depth questions to bring light on opinions, perceptions, motivations and other
aspects which are not directly deductible from the official documentations.
3.4.4 The selection and conduction of interviews with key-informants
Given the limited amount of time, and the nature of this study as explorative, the
number of conducted interviews only amounts to six – two for each city. Originally
three interviews were planned for each city, allowing for a politician, a civil servant
and a representative for a stakeholder-organisation to be interviewed. However, the
reluctance to cooperate amongst the politicians was prevalent, and even though
explicit care was taken to identify and invite only politicians responsible for city
marketing, the invitations were all denied. It seemed that the responsible politicians
were unsure of what to expect from such an interview – an observation which can
explain why all three propositions resulted in the recommendation of other persons
in the administration which were deemed more capable of providing information on
the topic. Even though civil servants and professionals are more capable of
providing such information, the responsible politicians still play an important role in
formulating the ambitions of the city; likewise do they have considerations in terms
of the use of city marketing which would have been interesting and useful for the
purpose of this study. It is therefore with regret that such interviews could not be
conducted, although it does show something about the extent to which city
marketing is considered an approachable topic for the decision-makers faced with
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the responsibility to make use of its potentials. The valuable information on the
‘ideological’ dimension of city marketing can therefore not be covered in this study.
However, this setback is not a catastrophe since politicians come and go while the
civil servants on the contrary stay long enough to know more about the true
strategies of the city than their elected superiors. In this sense, even though the
politicians are responsible opinion-shapers within the municipal authorities – the civil
servants and the representatives of the external stakeholder-organisations are likely
to be more reflected on the relative necessity and use of city marketing.
In Almere, the selection of participants was straightforward. As the only city of our
three cases, Almere has established an organisation where most responsibilities
and competencies relating to city marketing are present. The director of this
organisation, Mr. Hans Snel, agreed to participate in the interview (Appendix B,
1.2). Further, a representative with professional affiliation for Almere, Mr. Derk Knol,
was identified from the regional Chamber of Commerce (Dutch: Kamer van
Koophandel) and directly agreed to participate (Appendix B, 1.1).
Amersfoort proved a bit more difficult, though both the municipal authorities and the
chamber of commerce gladly cooperated. Yet, the pinpointing of the ideal keyinformants was complicated by the vast amount of different organisation of
stakeholders involved in the promotional activities of the city. The municipal
authorities are currently looking for a city marketing manager, which means that
their expertise is in a somewhat fragmented and inconsistent state. Again the
Chamber of Commerce proved an ideal choice and provided in Mrs. Esther
Hilthorst a person who had participated in many of the different debates and
discussions (Appendix B, 2.2). The municipality appointed a newly appointed
strategic advisor in Mrs. Janny de Boer, which knowledge of the processes and
ideas of Amersfoort was plenty for this purpose of this study (Appendix B, 2.2).
Our last city, Leiden, was even more complex. The politicians, the municipal
authorities and representatives from the stakeholder organisations all pointed
towards the same person; Mr. Robert Strijk, holding the position as head of
Centrummanagement Leiden. However, he unfortunately did not want to participate
in this study and our inquiry for other persons that participated in the city marketing
of Leiden led us to the director of the local tourist organisation, VVV Holland
Rijnland, Mrs. Carla Kieft. Although naturally preoccupied with the tourist-dimension
of city marketing she holds a chair around the table whenever city marketing is
discussed in Leiden, and therefore constituted an interesting informant (Appendix
B, 3.2). Again the Chamber of Commerce was the logical choice to represent
stakeholder-organisations, and Mrs. Saskia van Stuivenberg readily participated
(Appendix B, 3.1).
In general, it was important for this study that the interviewees all had participated in
the discussions and processes leading towards the current approach to city
marketing and the current state of affairs in terms of organisation and initiatives. In
retrospect, it is therefore not so surprising that the Chamber of Commerce was
represented in all three cases as the logic choice for a key-informant. The Chamber
of Commerce holds responsibility for stimulating economic growth and cohesion,
and employ regional consultants with the specific task of cooperating with local
stakeholders and authorities. In this way, the regional consultants from the
Chamber of Commerce are inherent participants in all initiatives that try to stimulate,
improve or maintain regional growth – such as city marketing and related activities.
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The interviews themselves were conducted as informal conversations, employing a
tentative interview guide to ensure a comparative and consistent outcome of the
conducted interviews. Before the interview, the interviewees were shortly informed
of the purpose of the study, though the specific twist concerning the relation
between the city in question and its neighbouring cities was not communicated as a
concern of the study, to keep such observations from occurring as a result of direct
stimulation. The major parts of each interview were recorded for later reference, and
are available as digitally recorded mp3-files (Appendix C). Appendix B contains brief
summaries of the conducted interviews, and references to the conducted
interviews will be presented as references to this appendix and the corresponding
section.
It is important to stress that the interviews were conducted to qualify the
observations made from advisory reports and policy documents. In this sense, they
do not represent primary sources of information but a secondary way of adding
empirical detail to the observations already made through the study of written
effects. Furthermore, through such informal conversations, the researcher can
obtain a relatively good feeling (although strongly subjective in nature) with the
perceived meanings and ways of thinking on city marketing, present in the city in
question.
3.5 Strengths and weaknesses with the selected methodology
Before diving into the study itself, it is worth to note some methodological strengths
and weaknesses. It goes to reason that an explorative study will contain some
methodological discrepancies and contradictory elements in the quest to make a
specific topic researchable. Both the theory and practice of city marketing is blurred
by conceptual weaknesses and a lack of agreeable definitions and existing
developed research methods. Furthermore, the efforts done to define, discuss and
distinguish the concepts used in this study have transferred attention from the
development of the methodology itself.
One of the strengths of the methodological approach employed is the broad
spectrum of elements which are included. The mix of scientific literature,
commercially devised advisory reports, policy documents and interviews of keyinformants are a strong asset to this study because it brings light on the topic from
different positions. However, as so often, this strength is also the weakness –
because the broad spectrum of methodological elements does not allow for a
precise and consistent approach to the way in which the empirical observations are
made. The comparative quality of this study should therefore definitely not be found
in comparing the three cities against each other, but more on the theoretical scale
where the differences between the cities are used to reflect on city marketing as
such. In addition, the observations in the three cities are moments in time, since a
chronological survey of the development of city marketing strategies over time has
not been implemented. The cities are in different states of development of their
strategies, which weakens the value of observations if they are not put into a
historical timeline. However, city marketing is a relatively new phenomenon and
developments in strategies and professionalism might be more fruitful to investigate
when more data are available.
A critical review of this study is therefore likely to indicate how a broader study of
city marketing as a phenomenon in contemporary urban governance can be
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devised. The limited amount of case cities, combined with the limited amount of
interviews conducted per city means that this study, besides being explorative in
nature, also should be seen as a first attempt to link theoretical speculation with
empirical observation – and that the results themselves are interesting indicatives of
what should be given attention in future studies.
In the next three chapters, the exploration of our three cases will be presented –
presenting how they have applied city marketing as means in their attempt to
position themselves as attractive locations to live, work and visit.
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4. The case of Almere – everything is possible!
To underline its unique position and the possibilities available there; the city of
Almere introduced the slogan “Everything is possible!” in 1998 (Dutch: Het kan in
Almere!) (Motivaction, 2003). This slogan both matches the entrepreneurial history
of the city itself, as well as the vast possibilities for development there. Almere is an
interesting city in many aspects. Founded on land captured from the sea, it is a true
example of the Dutch’s conquest of the water. The city does not have a long
history, although it is an interesting one. In 30 years the population has risen from
none to around 180.000 (Almere, 2006; CBS, 2006). Gaining a lot of this population
from the nearby located capital of Amsterdam, the relationship between the two
cities almost constitutes Almere as a suburb of Amsterdam. However, Almere is
planned to become one of the largest cities in the Netherlands because it is one of
the few areas in the country where space for expansion is available. It is believed
that Almere will amount to 220.000 inhabitants in 2020, and city marketing has
been introduced as a tool to reach a balanced composition of citizens and attract
companies, institutions and tourism (Appendix B, 1.2; Berenschot, 2006a). Even
more so, because Almere is fighting with a negative image and is not seen as an
rd
th
attractive city– scoring a disappointing rank of 23 among the 27 largest cities in
the Netherlands (ING & Berenschot, 2007).
In the following sections we will explore the competitive position of Almere (4.1), the
ambitions and visions present among the decision makers (4.2), the way in which
city marketing is implemented and organized (4.3) and lend special attention to the
role of neighbouring cities in all these aspects (4.4). The chapter will be concluded
with some general observations on city marketing in Almere (4.5). Throughout this
chapter the reader is recommended to make use of the map enclosed in the
appendixes for reference to place-names etc. (Appendix A, Map 1).
4.1 SWOT-analysis of Almere
As mentioned in the brief introduction above, Almere is located close to the capital
city of the Netherlands, Amsterdam. In many aspects, the dynamics of the city
stems from Amsterdam and Almere can almost be seen as an integrated part of
Amsterdam. This does not correspond with the national policy which aims to make
Almere an independent, mature city in its own right; neither does it conform with the
ambitions and vision of Almere as such (cf. 4.2).
The geographical location of Almere means that it has much room for further
development. It also means that there are, for Dutch standards, are relatively few
cities in the direct vicinity. Within the provincial borders of Flevoland, where Almere
is situated – only Lelystad is of interest in terms of competitive positioning. Lelystad
lies around 15 minutes away using public transportation, and holds an airport which
might grow in importance as a result of the limited expansion possibilities of the
large, international airport of Schiphol, south of Amsterdam. Amsterdam itself lies
approximately 30 minutes away, and constitutes the largest city of the Netherlands
as well as the dominating location for tourism, international companies, creative
industry and other aspects traditionally of interest in relation to city marketing. To
the south, the high-income districts above Utrecht also represent an area
wherefrom many companies move to Almere because of lack of expansion
possibilities. The media centre of the Netherlands, the city of Hilversum, also lies in
this area – and as already indirectly mentioned, Utrecht – a large university city and
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the fourth largest city of the Netherlands lies 40 minutes to the south. Also
Amersfoort, our second case city, lies within a reasonable distance to Almere and
can be said to belong to the competitive field in question.
In analyzing the competitive position of Almere, we can make use of the SWOTanalysis carried out by the advisory bureau and adopt notions from policy
documents in general (figure 4). From such analysis it becomes clear that the
advisors have identified the most general features of the competitive position of the
city, in their quest to provide a possible path for a city marketing strategy.
Opportunities
The lack of room in other locations in the
Randstad
Governmental policy favouring development
Individualization in the housing market
Cooperation with Amsterdam on the area of
city marketing (Amsterdam Partners)
Accessibility (outwards)
Amount of jobs within the city itself
Insufficient cultural, horeca, shopping and
education facilities
Public space not well-maintained
Bureaucratic municipal authorities
No special tourist attractions
Image of an incomplete city
The limits posed by protected areas
Environmental norms en pollution policies
Unbalanced composition of the population
Lower social cohesion
Threats
Strengths
Central location in the Netherlands
Available room for expansion
Accessibility (inwards)
Entrepreneurial attitude
Variable housing and companies
Architectural qualities
Recreational possibilities (nature, water)
Known for arranging large events
Weaknesses
Figure 4 –SWOT-analysis of Almere
interpretation based on data from (Berenschot, 2006a)
As frequently when dealing with SWOT-analysis, links between the positive and
negative aspects are rather clear. The overwhelming strength of Almere is the
spatial expansion possibilities, while the very fact that Almere still is not a mature
city make up the most weak spot – manifested by insufficient facilities and a lack of
variety in every other aspect than the housing. This immature state of the city can
also be seen in the commuting-patterns, where 45.000 inhabitants leave the city
every day to work somewhere else (primarily Amsterdam) while the companies
inside Almere only attracts 15.000 workers from the surrounding areas (Berenschot,
2006a). Combined with the rapidly increasing population, the city faces significant
challenges in building social cohesion, providing sufficient facilities and attracting
companies in need of the available workforce. In other, words: Almere is heavily
challenged not to become a residential city for the lower middle-class which can
not afford to live in Amsterdam, but still works there and probably maintain
emotional bonds. Even though this statement might seem exaggerated it entails
both the fundamental fear and the ultimate challenge of Almere in the years to
come.
The population of Almere is mixed and largely consists of the lower- and uppermiddle class. The higher income groups are very scarcely represented, and the
many newly build neighbourhoods provide a somewhat homogenous population
pattern (CBS, 2006), which is not as dynamic as wished for. Also, the lack of
facilities of higher education results in the lack of a specialized and knowledgeintensive workforce, which therefore means that Almere is less attractive for R&D
and other knowledge-based companies and industries (Appendix B, 1.1). In
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competitive terms, Almere is attractive because of the expansion possibilities, which
means that one can expect industries and companies in need for spatial expansion
should be inclined to locate there if they are not in need of highly educated
workforce as well.
Both in terms of attractiveness and competitive advantage on the area of residential
and commercial locations, the available room for expansion constitutes the largest
asset of Almere. This advantage is a substantial one; meaning that Almere is
guaranteed growth, and thus “only” needs to concentrate on obtaining the right
form of growth – making the city more attractive for a broader spectrum of people
and companies. In terms of tourism, Almere has limited to offer and considering the
massive challenges involved in heightening the attractiveness of the city as such –
one would not expect the city to concentrate much on tourism, if it was not for the
fact that all cities aim broad to satisfy a large mix of stakeholders and actors.
However, aiming on tourism might provide a vantage point because this is one of
the easier aspects to manage.
The competitive position of Almere is a complex one to deduct due to the fact that
it mainly consists of potentials. The geographical location of Almere is a very
favourable one under the condition that the infrastructural weaknesses can be
solved, and that national policy favours the expansion of the Lelystad airport. Trying
to manage growth, create social cohesion, attract a dynamic workforce and
establish a thriving business climate is some of the main challenges of Almere. The
current competitive advantage is room for expansion and development; very
traditional green-field, city-building advantages driven by the remnants of supplyside planning. Looking to the demands of the target-groups needed to realize the
potential of Almere inherently becomes necessary aspects of the growth
management; and city marketing can be an interesting tool in this struggle.
Considering its competitive position, Almere needs to be offensive on all aspects
associated with city marketing. Although the city need to improve its attractiveness
on all aspects; the strategies chosen will largely depend on the ambitions and
visions of the decision-makers and stakeholders involved – which we will explore in
the following section.
4.2 Ambitions and visions of Almere
The logic behind the application of city marketing in Almere is clear: the city is
growing at a rapid rate, and the amount of jobs needs to follow this to avoid the city
of becoming a massive, dead, suburb. The ambition of the city is closely linked with
the national planning policy (Ministery of Economic Affairs, 2004; Ministry of
Economic Affairs, 2004; Nota Ruimte, 2006), which means that Almere is likely to
grow to around 350.000 inhabitants in 2030 – positioning it as the fifth largest city
of the Netherlands in terms of population. Almere employs city marketing as means
of selective acquisition (ACM, 2007; Appendix B, 1.2); to influence the growth of the
city towards a more balanced and beneficial combination of workforce and
businesses (Berenschot, 2006a). Naturally, it is a broad endeavour aiming both to
maintain and strengthen the city’s positive aspects while devoting attention to the
less positive features in an effort to turn them into prosperous dimensions as well.
Almere’s status as a city full of modern architecture is an asset the municipal
authorities and their partners want to strengthen from a perspective of attracting
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tourists from the nearby tourist magnet of Amsterdam. Also recreational aspects
are high on the agenda, and the ambition is clearly to make Almere an attractive
destination for all kind of visitors – and increase the use of its facilities by its own
citizens as well (ACM, 2007). The ambition is to benefit from the strong position of
Amsterdam on the area of international tourism. Another point, which Almere to
some extent already has achieved, is to arrange important and prestigious events.
These events are pursued both because of the economic spin-offs generated by
the visitors, and the promotional value of such events in themselves (ACM, 2007;
Berenschot, 2006a). Almere also aims to increase the retail sector of the city,
recently symbolized with the opening of a new high-profile city-core with a variety of
shops and horeca. Further, the city logically aspires to improve the business climate
and mainly attract new companies that fit with the profile of the available workforce.
In terms of the citizens, different ambitions are concerned with improving the social
cohesion of the neighbourhoods, keep and attract young people (18 to 24 years)
and make the citizens of Almere proud of their city (Almere, 2006).
In general, the ambitions of Almere are outspoken and clearly formulated, reflecting
the position of the city as an entity almost certain to experience future growth and
therefore mostly concerned with attracting the “right” kind of growth. For example,
the argumentation for the focus on high-income groups is based on the
achievement of a balanced workforce, or a balanced composition of inhabitants.
Almere aims to become the fifth city of the Netherlands, and the second city in the
North part of the poly-centric metropolitan region known as the Randstad –
establishing itself as a fully grown city with all facilities and functions defining a large
city. In other words: Almere is a middle-sized city destined to become a large city
(in the Dutch context) and are seeing city marketing as one of the ways to achieve
this. The disastrous image of the city is to be improved so that people choose
Almere because they want to live there, rather than making a rational choice based
on its close location to Amsterdam and relatively low prices for housing
(Berenschot, 2006a).
Some of the ambitions are followed by clear targets, which are used for internal
benchmark of the progress (ACM, 2007). As always, the measurement of the
successfulness of initiatives is important for politicians and civil servants, and
Almere is certainly no exception. Between 2006 and 2030, at least 4.000 to 5.000
jobs should be created on an annual basis – partially in the hope of counteracting
on the skewed commuting-patterns mentioned in section 4.1. This means that in
total 24.000 jobs should be created. At the same time, the goal is to have reached
250.000 inhabitants in 2020 (ACM, 2007), which could suggest that the benchmark
for annual increase in jobs will be counterweighted by the rapid increase in
population as such. In other words: although the ambitions are clear, it seems that
the fundamental argumentation behind them allow two goals to counteract each
other. If both targets are met, Almere is not likely to experience a more balanced
commuting-behaviour since the new citizen’s most likely mean more outwards
commuting on a daily basis. The ‘outward accessibility’, mentioned as a weakness
in the SWOT-analysis (figure 4) is thus likely to increase as a result of the growth.
However, compared to population growth and job creation, commuting is less
important – although these components stress the importance of heavy investment
in infrastructure. At this moment, Almere only contains slightly more than half of the
population it is expected to have when it is fully developed, and the accessibility is
already a major problem (Berenschot, 2006a).
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Other ambitions are to increase the loyalty of the citizens to the city, increase the
use of the city by its own inhabitants and achieve a balanced class-composition of
the city’s inhabitants. The first two points are logic and interrelated while the last is
somewhat more troublesome, given that selective acquisition of both new
inhabitants and new companies are a major challenge to undertake. In addition,
companies are generally attracted by the available workforce and inhabitants are
generally attracted by job opportunities. It is clear that the two most pronounced
target-groups of the ambitions are heavily interdependent. If Almere wants to realize
its ambition of attraction more high-income citizens and companies, it has to invest
heavily on both aspects and find alternative ways of attracting both target-groups
(Appendix B, 1.1). In the next section we will explore which initiatives and which
organisational structure has been put in force to achieve these goals.
4.3 Implementation and organization of city marketing in Almere
As mentioned before, Almere is a young city. It is a true green-field city, established
in an empty place and gaining is growth from the surplus of older, fully developed
areas to the West and the South. This also means that massive planning and
construction projects both have and are taking place, and that the local authorities
are known to be both entrepreneurial and focused on action and achieving
results(Appendix B, 1.1). The slogan of the city “everything is possible!” refers to
both the entrepreneurial style of the city and the place for development available
there. The emphasis on city marketing can also be seen in the relatively prominent
set-up of the organisation given the chief responsibility of city marketing (figure 5).
Almere City Marketing (onwards: ACM) is the renewed version of the Almere City
Promotion (Dutch: Stichting Stadspromotie Almere), and the new organisation has
a number of interesting aspects which we shortly will touch.
Figure 5 – Organisation of city marketing in Almere
Chamber of Commerce (KvK)
Municipality of Almere
Tourist Organisation (VVV)
Almere Citymarketing (ACM)
Sponsor Network
Stakeholder organisations
By the author.
The independent position of ACM means that it is less susceptible to political
change than a traditional internal unit would be. Further, it provides an opportunity
to set distinct targets and allocate distinct funds to reach these targets. With a city
marketing organisation both in a coordinating and a stimulating role, the different
stakeholders and the municipal authorities know where to turn to for advice and
strategic cooperation. Also, it allows the ACM to provide advice on issues outside
their own competencies, when issues relating to city marketing are on the agenda.
ACM works together with major stakeholders and has an impressive amount of
partners and sponsors involved – besides the funds allocated by the municipal
authorities; it gains extra budgets from private and semi-public organisations. In
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addition, the leader of the ACM – Hans Snel – is a well-known expert on city
marketing, having earlier worked as a professional consultant for Berenschot on the
topic (Appendix B, 1.2). This peculiarity brings further leverage to the ACM and
contributes to the position of ACM as a professional organisation to be taken
serious in the dealing with different stakeholders, and coordination of the take
initiatives (Appendix B, 1.1).
The extent to which the city marketing strategies are embedded in the city and its
governance-structures can be seen in the set-up of the ACM. As the core of a
network of stakeholders and stakeholder-organisations, this central and semiindependent body has a significant impact on the strategic choices made. Because
the ACM in itself has some benchmarks and targets to reach, the stakeholders are
selectively contributing to the extent where their interests are compatible with the
ambitions of the city, and expressed in the targets the ACM has to achieve. The
clear position of the ACM also means that few can doubt who to turn to when
concerned with city marketing, and that such topics seldom are discussed without
the participation of the ACM (Appendix B, 1.2). Interestingly, the director of ACM
states that his organisation chiefly concerns itself with the external target-groups,
leaving the internal target-groups to the municipal authorities to deal with (Appendix
B, 1.2). A certain division of competencies is thus in effect, and the organisation of
city marketing in Almere can therefore be described as functionally divided in a
division dealing with maintaining and a division dealing with gaining. This division of
competencies, although seemingly logic and rational, is yet likely to become more
blurred in specific situation; where initiatives spans an overlap of external and
internal target-groups.
Looking more closely at the initiatives taken in Almere, a division can be made
between initiatives directed towards businesses, citizens and visitors. Even though
Almere has high ambitions for almost all aspects of city marketing the emphasis in
terms of actual initiatives is to be found on events. The idea is that events should
not just be for tourists but also stimulate both citizens and companies before they
are deemed especially interesting from a city marketing point of view. This
approach can also be found in the way ACM is allocating their limited funds in
support of the events which are thought to create the most economic spin-off, or
the best linkage with the city as such (Appendix B, 1.2). The same logic is applied
when ACM points to growth in the tourism and recreative sector as important
goals, aiming to increase both the number of tourists and the amount of money
spent by tourists with 15% before 2010. To reach this end, Almere cooperates with
tourism organisations both on a local and regional level, trying to make sure that
both local walking routes, the marina, the museums and the architecture is
promoted and offered to both Dutch and international tourists. By stimulating
tourism and the use of recreational facilities, external capital is attracted and the
knowledge and appreciation of Almere is likely to increase. Also, more visitors mean
more income for the retail and horeca sector, making it possible to establish more
choices in the city – to the mutual benefit of the businesses and the citizens of
Almere. These initiatives fit closely with the ambitions on tourism, recreation and
“pride of the citizens” presented in the previous section. Furthermore, it
corresponds with the idea of taking maximum benefit form the closely located larger
city of Amsterdam.
In terms of the more sophisticated dimensions of city marketing – the selective
acquisition – Almere is working together with Amsterdam in terms of attracting
international businesses to the region (Appendix B, 1.1). There even exists an
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agreement on the common acquisition initiatives, stating that a certain amount of
acquired companies should be located in Almere. In this sense, one can question
whether inter-urban competition is put out of force internally in this region while the
cities are allying themselves towards the international scope. Such alliances
constitute interesting and relatively rational choices. On the regional scale, however,
such cooperation is contra-intuitive and here the general rules of competition are
preserved. Close cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce (region Flevoland)
secures focus on local entrepreneurs and services for companies searching to
settle within the region, while the efforts to commit and involve stakeholders in the
decision-making and cost-sharing are commendable. An interesting notion is that
the borders of the regional chambers of commerce are changing, resulting in a
merge between the chambers dealing with Amersfoort and Almere (Appendix B,
1.1, 2.2) – a strange curiosity which one can question the rationality of, given the
fact that Almere is much more oriented towards Amsterdam, and Amersfoort much
more oriented towards Utrecht.
Referring to the idea on selective acquisition, it is not easy to deduct exactly what
Almere is doing to attract high-income groups. Obviously there are some initiatives
focused on promoting the possibility of buying land and building your own house
there (a very scarce possibility in the Netherlands) but the fact is that the
attractiveness of the neighbourhoods and housing in Almere is not at a sufficient
level to accomplish this ambition. Further, with the expected growth to around
350.000 inhabitants, one can question the extent to which Almere can be
“selective” in this matter, especially considering the national government playing a
large role in directing the growth of the urban population in the country. In terms of
the existing citizens, much is done to strengthen the social cohesion of the city, and
provide facilities for especially the young people (18 to 24 years). In developments,
planning and events, special care is taken to appeal to the young Almere-citizens,
in an effort to increase their loyalty to their city. This is done both with a short-term
and a long-term purpose. On the short term, Almere wants the younger people to
use Almere for their activities rather than going to Amsterdam, and on the longterm, Almere obviously wants the now young generation to stay in Almere when
they grow older. To reach this, many initiatives are done to keep the city attractive
and efforts are also made to try and position more high educations in Almere. High
education, being a crucial element of any full-bodied city, is an almost non-existing
component in the city at this moment (Appendix B, 1.1, 1.2; Berenschot, 2006a),
thus posing a challenge to both the ambitions of the city, and the general
attractiveness of the city for both companies and inhabitants.
4.4 The role of neighbouring cities
As can be deducted from the last three sections, it is almost impossible to say
“Almere” without saying “Amsterdam”. The specific historical background of the
city, its location, and the high level of dependence on the facilities and jobs in
Amsterdam create a situation where Almere to some extent is functionally
integrated as a suburb of Amsterdam. This specific geography is mostly seen as a
competitive advantage for Almere, aiming initiatives to take benefit of the closeness
to Amsterdam – both in terms of attracting tourists, citizens and companies. The
dominant role of Amsterdam is treated as a matter-of-fact, and never as a
disadvantage. In other words, Amsterdam is not seen as a competing city and
therefore does not represent a threat or a weakness to the strategic plans of
Almere but merely a strength and an opportunity to benefit from. The critic mind is
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tempted to question whether this semantic categorizing in positive or negative
words is connected to any real analysis or just reflects a specific choice or
perception amongst the decision-makers and opinion-shapers. Indeed, there are
mutual benefits to be gained from the close location of Amsterdam but at the same
time numerous disadvantages.
Figure 6 – The competitive field around Almere
By the author.
As can be seen in figure 6, Almere is surrounded by many cities to which it relates
in terms of a competitive field. Most noticeable are the other middle-sized cities
surrounding Amsterdam, because Almere definitely is competing with these cities
for the spill-over generated by the close geographical location to this dominating
urban node. Less important, a larger number of smaller cities between Almere and
Utrecht constitute a high-income area which orients itself towards both Amsterdam
and Utrecht before Almere in terms of retail, urban facilities etc. However, many
owners of companies settled in Almere lives in this area as well. To the South East,
Amersfoort is a potential serious competitor in terms of business location, because
this city also has land open for development, combined with a much better image
than Almere.
The dependency on Amsterdam is likely to counteract on the efforts and ambitions
of Almere to become a fully matured city. This dependency is only likely to increase
in the years to come, especially taking into account the amount of the new citizens
which will come from Amsterdam, or settle in Almere because the housing in
Amsterdam is too expensive. Given the prospects of population growth it would
seem naïve to suggest that these new inhabitants will choose Almere as a result of
an emotional attraction, rather than a rational one. In addition, heavy investments in
accessibility, in terms of roads and railways will inevitably increase the ease to
which the citizens of Almere can make use of Amsterdam instead of Almere. The
future developments seem to suggest an increasing inter-dependency between the
two cities, and lead to more interaction and functional integration. Without
elaborating on the ideas of poly-nuclear urban regions, the functional integration
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between Almere and Amsterdam is only likely to increase in the decades to come.
To some extent, the only buffer to prevent Almere to physically grow together with
Amsterdam is the geographical constraint, in terms of water – a precondition the
Dutch has a pretty unique reputation of being able to overcome.
Although Amsterdam is absolutely dominant in terms of the neighbouring cities,
there are other cities to consider. Around Amsterdam are a number of middle-sized
cities which are operating from positions in the urban hierarchy similar to the one of
Almere. These cities are not mentioned in any serious manner in policy documents
and are not likely to have had any impact on the strategic decisions made. This
seems strange, especially considering the ambition of Almere to take benefit of the
close location to Amsterdam. Following the rationality of such benefits of the
specific geographical location, and likewise in the competitive position – one should
expect these cities to have made the same rational deductions, thus competing
against Almere to maximize their individual benefit from their vicinity to Amsterdam.
There are signs that this is exactly what is happening, yet Almere (and probably
none of the other cities) does not seem to have investigated enough attention on
how to increase their competitive advantage in this struggle. As mentioned in an
earlier section, Almere cooperates with Amsterdam in attracting international
companies, and so does all the other middle-sized cities in the region.
Geographically speaking, Almere is not the most logic member of this alliance – and
the real reason for its being there should probably be found in the fact that Almere
too can increase the attractiveness of Amsterdam Region, because of its large
amount of relatively affordable land for development.
The nearby city of Lelystad represents a logic opportunity of Almere, because of its
airport that might have some expansion possibilities, which could mean that it will
be given some international carriers if the international airport of Schiphol (located
South of Amsterdam) is disallowed further expansion. However, until that moment
Lelystad does not really impact the strategy of Almere in any noticeable way. The
same holds true for other cities in the vicinity, such as Hilversum, Utrecht or
Amersfoort.
However, when acknowledging that different strategic initiatives should be directed
towards different target-groups this naturally adds a notion of phenomena playing
roles on different scales. To illustrate this we will shortly consider a specific example
from Almere’s content: namely when the city tries to attract high income
inhabitants. A major concentration of this target-group is currently living very close
to Almere, to the South – just at the mainland North of Utrecht and Hilversum.
Certainly there are much more high incomers to attract but the incentives to locate
in an area already known as a prosperous and maybe even posh neighbourhood
will without doubt be significant. This means that Almere is in a situation of
competition with this specific area, as well as with Amsterdam, Utrecht and
Amersfoort – which are all cities containing much more prominent and attractive
neighbourhoods than Almere. Therefore we should expect Almere acknowledge
this lack of competitive advantage, resulting in either an adjustment of ambitions, or
initiatives based to increase the competitive position of the city in relation to this
specific target-group. However, this does not seem to be the case in Almere at
present.
A part of the explanation towards why such selectiveness of strategies does not
seem to be happening at the moment should probably be attributed to the
deceiving format of policy documents – circumventing the truth by emphasizing
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positive aspects and only mentioning negative aspects when they can be used as
justifications for specific actions. However, the rationality behind the ambitions of
attracting high income groups to Almere is more based on the acknowledgment of
the need of such citizens to reach a balanced class-composition, rather than a
rational analysis of the cities competing for the same target-groups. The
argumentation therefore seems more logic than rational.
In general, the role of neighbouring cities on the strategic city marketing of Almere is
very limited when the observer looks beyond the frequently pronounced role of
Amsterdam. The ambitions and visions of Almere leave very little evidence of the
specific position of the city in relation to the neighbouring cities. Most ambitions and
visions could have been expressed for any middle-sized city in a state of growth.
4.5 City marketing in Almere
The competitive position of Almere is an intriguing one. Located in a very tight
competitive field and bound to receive the surplus of the growth of neighbouring
cities. Almere is an example of an ambitious city, posed with serious challenges and
seeing city marketing as one of the ways to achieve its ambitions. The city has kept
a continuous emphasis on the efforts to improve its image and try to influence the
way in which potential companies, citizens and visitors perceive the city, while trying
to increase the loyalty and satisfaction of the ones already present in the city. With
immense growth both in the last decades and the decades to come, Almere faces
a very heavy burden in controlling the development and creating a prosperous,
well-functioning and well-balanced city. Consequently, the idea to employ
selectiveness might be problematic, although it still holds practical relevance.
In terms of city marketing, one should note two specific characteristics: First, the
institutionalisation of the City Marketing Almere (ACM) as a semi-independent
organisation, relieving it to some extent from bureaucratic inertia and rendering it
less susceptible to changes in the political climate of the municipal authorities.
Second, the division of competencies between the municipal authorities and the
ACM, roughly letting ACM concentrate on increasing attractiveness of Almere for
the acquisition of companies, citizens and visitors, while the municipal authorities
focus on the existing ones as a part of their traditional competences and tasks. The
role of the ACM as advisor for the municipal government and the intertwined
partnership-building present in Almere are signs of a serious and thought-through
approach to city marketing.
The specific initiatives launched are sporadic and seem insufficient when opposed
with the challenges the city is faced by. Employing city marketing as an instrument
of growth-management, through selective acquisition, has been a rational choice
following the logic of city marketing and entrepreneurial urban governance – yet,
considering the image-problem of the city it is likely to be almost impossible to
successfully achieve positive results of the efforts without further investment and
broadening of the initiatives. The paradox in Almere, fighting with a bad image and
expecting extensive growth in the years to come, constitutes a precondition for the
likely success of the city marketing strategies. Understandably, selective acquisition
is difficult to achieve in a city with a low attraction-value in terms of perception
(Appendix B, 1.1).
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Although the city (and the ACM) can act in a selective way towards which events it
support and do this with plausible reference to how much it benefits the city and its
image, this line of thought becomes far-fetched when formulating strategies
concerned with companies and citizens. The population of Almere is going to
increase and it seems wishful thinking to think one can influence the composition of
Almere to a large degree simply by marketing-efforts. Furthermore, real estate
developers are building housing based on rational calculations on which kind of
people will buy them, and even though such companies to some extent share
interests with the city in creating attractive and high-income neighbourhoods, they
first and foremost make their choices based on economic feasibility. In terms of
companies it might be more realistic to influence the development, though the
increase of population brings a need of jobs with it which again render it necessary
for Almere to attract any kind of company, bringing jobs for the local or regional
population. Following this line of thought, the current initiatives will not suffice, and
severe investments are needed to increase both the actual, and the perceived
quality and attraction of the city.
The approach to city marketing in Almere is clearly influenced by the city’s position
as a growth-city in a tight competitive field. Containing efforts aimed towards both
internal and external target-groups the approach seems to fully embrace the
theoretical background of city marketing. However, the competitive position of
Almere in relation to its neighbouring cities points to unclearness about the true
competitive advantage of Almere. The professional style and the organising
capacity of the city is admirable and might pose an example to other cities, yet in
the specific situation of Almere it is still very likely to fall short of the challenge.
Applying marketing-techniques to Almere in the quest to influence the growth in the
years to come is an effort likely to ask many resources to achieve success, still it
would be irrational not to increase these efforts, since much of the elements and
developments composing the unfavourable elements of the city today, are likely to
increase if continuous, strategic actions is not taken.
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5. The case of Amersfoort – city with a heart
Amersfoort is the second largest city in the province of Utrecht. The city presents
itself as the “city with a heart”, referring to the well preserved medieval core of the
city (Dutch: “Stad met een hart”). In terms of city marketing, Almere has launched a
lot of loosely coordinated initiatives, relying heavily on local initiatives and supported
by the municipal authorities. However, lately Amersfoort has decided to introduce a
more coordinated and controlled approach to city marketing, which is why the
municipality currently is taking steps to hire a coordinator (Amersfoort, 2006).
Amersfoort itself lies to the east of Utrecht, close to the attractive nature areas
known as the Utrecht Heights and the Veluwe (Dutch: “Utrechtse Heuvelrug” and
“de Veluwe”). In 1985, the city contained around 88.000 inhabitants, a number
which is estimated to have reached 158.000 in 2015 (Amersfoort, 2007). New
neighbourhoods have risen around the city, and even though the expansion
possibilities are rapidly decreasing, the city still has some room to expand business
th
and housing areas. Amersfoort score a position as the 14 most popular city in the
CityBrandValue-index, an index that compare the brand-value of the 27 largest
cities in the Netherlands, using a number of indicators (ING & Berenschot, 2007). In
th
the same index, Amersfoort reach the 9 place as a place to live (ING &
Berenschot, 2007). The image of Amersfoort is thus a positive one and the city is
likely to use this in its future promotion and planning.
In the following sections we will explore the competitive position of Amersfoort (5.1),
the ambitions and visions of the municipality (5.2), the organisation and the
initiatives already taken (5.3), and the role of the neighbouring cities (5.4). The
chapter concludes with general observations on city marketing in Amersfoort (5.5).
Throughout this chapter the reader is recommended to make use of the map
provided in the appendixes (Appendix A, Map 2), for reference to place-names etc.
5.1 SWOT-analysis of Amersfoort
Amersfoort is a mature and complete city in its own right. The city is almost 750
years old and even though it has grown relatively rapidly in the last decades, the
city presents a balanced, varied and dynamic climate both in terms of population,
business, jobs and cultural facilities (Berenschot, 2006b). The distance from
Amersfoort to the larger, neighbouring city of Utrecht is 15 minutes using public
transport, and the infrastructure is generally sufficient and well-developed.
Accessibility from most of the Randstad is sufficient, even though Amersfoort – as
all other cities in the West of the Netherlands – suffers from heavy traffic jams in
rush hour periods. Although Amersfoort is surrounded by nature areas, it still holds
some room for development. The room for expansion is predicted to be fully used
in 2015, a year which also forms the turning point from a sporadic to a more
coordinated approach to city marketing (Amersfoort, 2006). Amersfoort will focus
on quality-improvement after 2015 and are planning to use the upcoming 750-year
celebrations to make a turn in its city marketing activities (Berenschot, 2006b).
In many ways, Amersfoort looks like a regional centre – having a seemingly large
hinterland to the East and South, and housing facilities that services the
surrounding areas. Although Amersfoort to some extent can be seen as a regional
urban node, it is not filling this role in terms of retail shopping, higher education etc.
Neighbouring cities are competing heavily on these areas and Amersfoort does not
hold specific competitive advantages on these aspects and therefore does not
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profit from the larger hinterland (Berenschot, 2006b). The cities in the surrounding
area might rely on Amersfoort in terms of its hospital but they are fully equipped in
terms of shopping and for cultural activities, education etc. they might as well turn
to Utrecht in stead of Amersfoort. To the West of Amersfoort, people are much
more focused on Utrecht or the areas north of Utrecht and the area to the East is
known as the Dutch bible-belt, thought to hold a population which is not attracted
by the facilities offered by cities (Berenschot, 2006b).
Opportunities
The functionally small hinterland
Limited retail shopping in the centre
Not attractive enough for weekend-tourism
Congress location (central location)
The location of the National Institute for
Cultural Heritage
The highly educated workforce
Increasing traffic jams lowering accessibility
Increasing competition from other cities
Threats
Strengths
Central location in the Netherlands
Accessibility
Historical “heart” of the city
Regional festivals and events
Social cohesion, Strong neighbourhoods
Highly educated population
Strong business climate (sector-specific)
Varied and attractive housing
Weaknesses
Figure 7 –SWOT-analysis of Amersfoort
Interpretation based on data from (Berenschot, 2006b)
Looking at the SWOT-analysis presented in figure 7, it seems like Amersfoort is
doing relatively well. The absolute strength of Amersfoort is to be found in the
combination of a highly educated workforce and a strong social cohesion in the
neighbourhoods. Combined with a favourable geographical location and an
infrastructure that render Amersfoort a very accessible location from a regional or
even national perspective – the city’s attractiveness is high for most aspects
concerning both inhabitants and companies. People working elsewhere in the
Randstad settle in Amersfoort because of the accessibility, and the same is partly
true for students that study on the universities in Amsterdam or Utrecht
(Berenschot, 2006b). In Amersfoort, a number of higher educations are offered in
cooperation with the HU – an institution for non-academic, higher education with
headquarters located in Utrecht. Further, many footloose companies in the financial
sector has located offices in Amersfoort – and the city is developing a cluster of
companies in this sector, as well as in the ICT sector. Attracted by accessibility,
business climate and the highly educated workforce – which again is attracted by
the attractive residential neighbourhoods, constitute a positive spiral which provides
a sound basis for Amersfoort. In comparison with Utrecht, Amersfoort benefits from
the specific clustering of companies, although Utrecht definitely poses a serious
competitor to Amersfoort as a location of companies seeking a highly educated
workforce (Atlas voor Gemeenten, 2007).
If everything seems to be so fine in Amersfoort, why are they then eager to use city
marketing? Looking at the weaker points and threats (figure 7) it is clear that
increasing competition from other cities in itself forms the main argument for city
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marketing. An observation supported by the policy documents concerned with
promotion and positioning of the city (Amersfoort, 2006). In other words: it seems
safe to assume that Amersfoort wants to enforce city marketing to defend its
competitive advantages, while at the same time aiming to improve the elements
which are not competitive enough at the present. According to Berenschot’s
analysis (Berenschot, 2006b) and the policy documents of the municipality
(Amersfoort, 2006, 2007) – these weaker elements are grouped in tourism,
shopping and culture; all aspects which orient themselves on the surrounding
hinterland, and all traditional elements of city marketing.
Considering the above, one would expect Amersfoort to be chiefly concerned with
keeping its competitive advantages as an attractive location for citizens and
companies – while launching some specific initiatives aimed towards improving the
attractiveness of its city core, in terms of retail shopping, cultural facilities and
tourism. However, the initiatives should depend on the ambitions and visions of the
decision-makers, which we will explore in the following section.
5.2 Ambitions and visions of Amersfoort
In the advisory report on city marketing in Amersfoort, the consultants (Berenschot,
2006b) point to the inhabitants as the group to be given special attention in the
strategic initiatives of the city. Increasing the loyalty of the citizens and the emotional
connection with the city are seen as major points of attention in the case of
Amersfoort. Already by looking at the SWOT-analysis presented in the same report
(figure 6) one could question the logic behind this statement, since the inhabitants
of Amersfoort are above national average both in terms of income and level of
education while the neighbourhoods are generally seen as strong and wellfunctioning (Atlas voor Gemeenten, 2007; Berenschot, 2006b; CBS, 2006). The
consultancy report pronounces the use of the current inhabitants as ambassadors
in the promotion of the city (Berenschot, 2006b). However charming, this might be
a symbol of lack of real problems in Amersfoort. Corresponding to Kavaratzis’
tertiary communication (Kavaratzis, 2004), the citizens might indeed be a means of
increasing the reputation of a city – but as a prime strategy for city marketing it
seems rather uninspired. Still, the chief amount of the population is believed to have
chosen Amersfoort because of its geographical location – rendering their choices
rational rather than emotional, and subsequently a target for initiatives designed to
committing the new inhabitants more to the city (Appendix B, 2.2). An
argumentation of similar composition to the one observed in Almere although much
different in effect, content and extent.
The report mostly refers to existing qualities and positive elements of Amersfoort,
and advice to invest in increasing their overall quality (Berenschot, 2006b). More
importantly though, a notion is made that companies should be connected more to
the initiatives made, and that Amersfoort in general has a thriving number of
grassroots and stakeholder-organisations involved in city marketing related
initiatives – while the overall coordination seems nonexistent at the moment. We will
return to this advice in the following section, though, it should be mentioned that a
more coordinated approach to city marketing is among the ambitions of the
municipal authorities (Amersfoort, 2006; Appendix B, 2.1, 2.2). However, such
ambitions are more directed towards the organisation of city marketing (cf. 5.3),
than to the visionary ambitions dealing with the wanted development of the city.
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Looking specifically at the ambitions and visions of Amersfoort quickly leads to the
conclusion that the city is functioning very well, and has managed to attract citizens
and companies who contribute positively to the further attractiveness of the city.
The expansion of the city and the resulting population growth is running to a halt
and the city is already well-balanced in socio-economic terms. In such a situation
one should expect the ambitions and visions of the city to be mostly fulfilled, which
indeed seems to be the case. The current ambitions of the municipal authorities
point towards a strengthening of the already profound ICT-sector in the city, the
tourism sector and further position Amersfoort as a knowledge-city (Amersfoort,
2007). All the while, the municipality has a clear ambition to keep the inhabitants
satisfied and connect them more to the city (Appendix B, 2.1). Especially the
younger inhabitants are in focus of the municipal ambitions, sketching initiatives
which will make Amersfoort an interesting city for the young generations – including
efforts on recreational facilities and trying to increase the amount of choices of
higher education offered in the city. Furthermore, the city wants to increase its
position as a city offering much in terms of cultural and recreational opportunities –
becoming an attractive and logic choice as destination for weekend-tourism or
events tourism, while giving the existing inhabitants a feeling of a lively and
prominent city centre (Amersfoort, 2006).
Amersfoort holds a clear ambition of improving its competitive position in terms of
the recreational use of its city centre. Although an impressive medieval core is left,
other elements of the inner city is lessening its attractiveness – including the lack of
a broad retail sector, and a likewise limited horeca-sector. The municipality clearly
wants to improve these elements, rendering the centre of the city a logic meeting
place and an attractive destination (Hoogzaad, 2004). This ambition is not only
conditioned by the idea of increasing the tourism sector as such but also
connected to the linking of the citizens in the newly developed areas towards the
centre of Amersfoort. Due to the plentiful choices in the surrounding area, once an
inhabitant of a suburb of Amersfoort has gotten into his car, he might as well drive
the 15 minutes to Utrecht who offers a broader choice on almost all aspects of
importance.
Although these ambitions are linking to city marketing, they are not – like in Almere
– linked to specific benchmarks or even to expressions uncovering to which extent
the municipal authorities sees city marketing playing a role in the realisation of these
ambitions. As will be clear in the next section, much is already done and city
marketing in Amersfoort might be more a question of coordination than of
innovation. However, it should also be mentioned that the city is in an intermediate
state in terms of city marketing – looking towards changing focus towards pure
quality-increase after 2015 where the development has reached its peak
(Amersfoort, 2006, 2007; Appendix B, 2.1, 2.2; Berenschot, 2006b).
5.3 Implementation and organization of city marketing in Amersfoort
In Amersfoort, no clear organisation exists which have the responsibility for city
marketing. The efforts are many, and although the amount of organisations,
institutions and stakeholders contributing to the initiatives are extensive and to
some extent overlaps (Appendix B, 2.1), there are no clear coordination present,
thus no clear strategic element in the way of implementing or organising city
marketing. At the moment, the municipal authorities have established a
coordination group – holding representatives of all the different organisations
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involved with city marketing, and provided with a limited budget to support specific
initiatives and events (Amersfoort, 2006). The many organisations committed to
position Amersfoort high in terms of knowledge, innovation, recreation, tourism,
events and other different agendas are loosely coordinated from this coordination
group, and lately the municipality has begun the preparations to hire a city
marketing coordinator – to be given a central role in the streamlining of the different
initiatives linking up with the promotional efforts of Amersfoort. Recently, Amersfoort
also pronounced the wish to move away from city promotion and embrace city
marketing. Whatever is meant by city marketing in this case, it probably refers to a
more strategic and selective approach than the one present at the moment.
Figure 8 – Organisation of city marketing in Amersfoort
Many different active groups
Municipality of
Amersfoort
Prominent Amersfoort
Stakeholder organisations
Coordination Group
Chamber of Commerce (KvK)
Tourist Organisation (VVV)
By the author.
As illustrated in figure 8, the organisation of city marketing in Amersfoort is largely
loose and very de-centralized at the moment. To some extent this can be seen as
strength, because the willingness from citizens and stakeholder organisations to
participate in the promotion of Amersfoort is definitely prominent. However, such
decentralisation can also be a weakness, due to a lack of control, a lack of clear
competencies and the problem of coordinating the many efforts. Without clear
coordination it might be difficult to determine the direction of the marketing
initiatives – and a sort of anarchistic behaviour of the various interest groups could
result in unclear communication and mutually counteracting initiatives. On one
hand, this might blur the message Amersfoort tries to communicate - at the other
hand, the initiatives in Amersfoort is already existing without a distinct coordination,
hinting towards the acceptance and interests of different stakeholders who already
have organised themselves after shared functional interests. Acknowledging their
interest in coordinating these efforts and influencing the overall direction of the
initiatives, the municipal authorities have lifted their responsibility and are currently
working towards a more strategic and coordinated approach to city marketing. An
element of such a new strategy is likely to be selectiveness in the initiatives
supported by the municipal authorities (Appendix B, 2.1).
One of the many groups who has already been involved heavily in city marketing in
Amersfoort is the so-called “Prominent Amersfoort” (Dutch: Amersfoort Prominent
op de Kaart). This organisation consists of many of the business-leaders of the city
and has done much to try and position Amersfoort stronger in a regional and
national context. It was also this organisation who took the initiative, together with
the municipality, to hire a consultancy bureau to work out a city marketing plan for
Amersfoort. Prominent Amersfoort has also contributed in other ways to the city
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marketing of Amersfoort and is seen as the most frequent partner of the municipal
authorities on the topic. It is an organisation most likely to play an influential role in
the formulation of the city marketing strategy in terms future initiatives and
investments. (Appendix B, 2.1, 2.2)
With such a sporadic organisation of city marketing (figure 8) it is difficult to get the
full overview of the amount of initiatives in progress. However, the municipality has
presented a report, wherefrom it can be deducted which initiatives are consciously
considered elements of the city’s city marketing efforts (Amersfoort, 2006).
Remembering our operationalization of “city marketing” in this study (cf. 3.4) this
report can be used to study the initiatives made.
Not surprisingly, many of the initiatives are directed towards the citizens. Having
added new neighbourhoods to the city in the last decades, Amersfoort has
launched various initiatives aimed towards the new citizens. Mostly, this has been
done as combined efforts of the municipality, interest organisations and private
companies, such as real estate developers etc. Twice a year, an arrangement
called “Pleasant Amersfoort” is designed to welcome new citizens and introduce
them to the authorities and the city as such. Other events of this style are arranged
on a continuous basis, and although these efforts are kept on a relatively small
scale they seem to be valued much by both the citizens and the organizers. Lately,
the city has focused more on students, trying to position Amersfoort as a true
student city, following the increased number of educations offered in Amersfoort in
cooperation with the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (Dutch: Hogeschool
Utrecht) (Amersfoort, 2006). Corresponding with the ambitions of connecting the
citizens of Amersfoort more to the city and its centre, these initiatives are treasured
and can be considered prominent symptoms of a city which aim to please its
inhabitants.
Likewise, much is done in terms of attracting and pleasing companies. Events
where entrepreneurs are invited to investigate the possibilities in Amersfoort is
arranged frequently, while “meet the city”-events analogue to the ones offered to
new citizens are held to welcome new companies. A number of companies already
established in Amersfoort contribute to the efforts of arranging events directed
towards attracting new businesses, networking with existing ones and in general
the involvement of the private sector seems quite profound (Berenschot, 2006b).
Also close cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce, who plays a role in the city
marketing efforts as well, is kept high on the agenda. Especially, the profound
position of the financial service sector and the ICT-sector is interesting aspects of
Amersfoort, offering many job opportunities and the Chamber of Commerce is
proactively working together with the city to strengthen the sector further. Events
such as “Amersfoort pleasant for entrepreneurs”, “Amersfoort Business Days” and
“Amersfoort Diner” are just some examples on how the private companies, public
institutions and the municipal authorities are working together to establish a good
business climate, and increase the knowledge of its existence through promotion.
The “Amersfoort Family Days” and other festivals have gained some reputation, also
outside Amersfoort, and draws people from the region to visit the city. More known,
the tennis-tournament “Dutch Open” is arranged in Amersfoort on a yearly basis,
and constitutes the major sports event of the city. In the near future, namely 2009,
th
a large event will be arranged to celebrate the 750 year of the city of Amersfoort –
at the same time representing a logic point of departure for the city’s renewed
marketing efforts (Berenschot, 2006b). Of pure promotional nature, Amersfoort has
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also launched a campaign with the Dutch Railways, suggesting passengers to visit
Amersfoort, using campaign posters on railroad stations connected with the city. A
promotional video has been made, reflecting the vast initiatives and the low
budgets of the individual initiatives (Amersfoort, 2006) but more importantly, the
Utrecht Tourism and Recreation Organisation (UTR) is actively involved in the
promotion of recreational and touristy activities in Amersfoort (Amersfoort, 2006).
In its planning efforts and physical development, Amersfoort seems conscious
about the perspectives of city marketing. The re-development of some central
neighbourhoods, the development of a harbour-area (Eemhaven) and heavy
investments in improvement and establishment of facilities are all carried out with an
emphasis on using such developments to communicate the proactive nature and
prosperity of Amersfoort. However, the many initiatives in Amersfoort is yet to be
truly integrated and implemented – or studied as an example of very sporadic multilevel governance.
5.4 The role of neighbouring cities
When looking at the argumentations behind the ambitions of Amersfoort, both in
terms of policy documents and the advisory report building on interviews with
opinion-shapers, it is clear that the neighbouring cities have had a reasonable
impact on the choices made. In many ways, Amersfoort is a logic regional centre,
although many of the cities in the vicinity of Amersfoort hold enough facilities to
render this ambition difficult. Reflected in the ambitions of the city of Amersfoort, the
choice to focus on the increased value of the inner city draws some resemblance to
a competitive attitude towards neighbouring cities. Still, the emphasis is laid on
existing inhabitants who should be attracted to use the inner city more. Except of in
the health care sector, Amersfoort has low ambitions on filling a regional role –
although it still wants to be an attractive location to visit for some cultural or
recreational time. It is an ambition, though not considered a very realistic one at the
moment, to become a regional centre for retail as well, thus gaining an advantage
of other cities, such as Veenendaal and Hilversum (Appendix B, 2.2) – although it is
seen as almost impossible to compete with Utrecht to the West. In general,
Amersfoort seems to reflect on the surrounding cities when formulating its own
ambitions.
Also in terms of business location is Amersfoort aware of its position in competition
with other cities. Utrecht, Veenendaal, and even Almere, Appeldoorn (Appendix A,
Map 2) and Twente (a region bordering Germany, 60 km away) is mentioned as
potential competitors in the attraction of businesses. From a consideration based
on its strengths, Amersfoort focuses on strengthening the existing sectors by
acquisition of companies that are interesting in joining the thriving clusters already
present. Having established its advantage as being development space combined
with highly trained workforce and already established businesses, Amersfoort has
purposefully looked at its neighbours before deciding which way to go. Although
one can question to what extent this has been a choice, or a natural development
of positive spin-offs, the city is mentioning the competitive advantage in these
sectors in comparison with competing cities (Amersfoort, 2007). Whether this is a
retrospect deduction or a sign of marketing-minded rationalisation or not, it does
show that the neighbouring cities are playing a quite distinct role in the thinking
about city marketing in Amersfoort. The extent to which neighbouring cities play a
role in the current initiatives can be questioned, though these initiatives mostly are
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directed inwards and therefore less likely to be impacted by concerns of
neighbouring cities in the first place. Amersfoort needs initiatives aiming outwards,
while strengthening the selectiveness of the plentiful inwardly directed, existing
initiatives.
In terms of education, Amersfoort, aiming to become a true student city, aspires to
function as an alternative to the dominant neighbouring city of Utrecht. The rapid
public transport between these two cities means that it is plausible to live in the one
and study in the other. Through increased cooperation with the educational
institutions in Utrecht, the amount of educations offered in Amersfoort is growing,
automatically giving Amersfoort a regional role to play in this segment as well.
Furthermore, the student population is known to give life to the city centre,
spending money and time there. Amersfoort does not aim to compete with Utrecht
on this matter but to benefit from the huge amount of students attracted to Utrecht
every year, functioning as a sort of satellite city in these aspects.
Figure 9 – The competitive field around Amersfoort
By the author.
As can be quickly deducted from the figure above (figure 9), the competitive field
around Amersfoort is relatively tight to the North and the West. The relation to cities
such as Nijmegen, Arnhem, Appeldoorn, Deventer and Zwolle is mostly a
competitive one in terms of the population living in the region between Amersfoort
and these cities. In terms of serious competition Amersfoort mostly face Hilversum
and Almere which both are location for businesses, and Utrecht, Arnhem and
Nijmegen in terms of regional tourism. As mentioned in the previous sections, the
neighbouring smaller cities are also identified as competitors in terms of retail
shopping although this dimension might represent a detail in terms of general city
marketing.
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5.5 City marketing in Amersfoort
As is the case with most middle-sized cities in the Netherlands, Amersfoort finds
itself in a relatively tight competitive field. Although the city is not located in the
densest cluster of cities, its size does not allow it to play a dominant or selfsufficient role. The ambitions of the city are moderate, and even though strategic
city marketing is seen as an element in achieving these ambitions, it does not yet
represent a priority in the efforts made. This picture might be changing with the
recent decision to hire a city marketer and give him/her the task to coordinate and
improve the quality of the many initiatives already present in the city, yet it is a
development to be seen in the years to come.
At the moment, city marketing in Amersfoort is interesting because it is not a
centralised endeavour and because many of the initiatives has been started by
different interest groups, serving different purposes and in general showing an
extensive organising capacity. The municipal authorities are playing a coordinating
role in all the initiatives, stimulating them, co-funding and to some extent
coordinating their efforts (Amersfoort, 2006; Appendix B, 2.1, 2.2). A true strategic
approach to city marketing is not to be found, and much of the initiatives found in
Amersfoort can be attributed to promotional efforts rather than real selective,
thought-through, strategies to increase a share of specific segments of a market.
Except in the case with attracting more students, and becoming a student city –
little specifically directed initiatives seem to have been launched for external targetgroups. Contrary to this, the initiatives aimed towards welcoming new citizens and
new companies to the city seem to be the result of logic reasoning, acknowledging
the importance of connecting these internal target-groups to the city.
An analysis of the existing initiatives and activities in Amersfoort clearly reflect the
inwards focus, implying an emphasis on maintaining a strong competitive position
rather than improving it. On some specific areas Amersfoort acts more offensive,
aiming to increase its regional position as a business location, city of students and
attempting to improve its attractiveness to tourists as well. Although some aspects
of product-development can be traced, the outwards attempts seems to be chiefly
of promotional nature. Amersfoort can be seen as an example of a city where most
things are functioning satisfactorily. This means that the urgency of the city
marketing efforts is less profound. One might suggest that Amersfoort embarks on
city marketing because they fear increased competition from other cities, and want
to sustain their current position before their competitive advantage becomes
endangered. However, it is difficult to point to a city which would be able to
threaten Amersfoort’s competitive position at the moment. Even when looking at
specific target-groups, such as retail shopping – most neighbouring cities only
threatens Amersfoort in the sense that they offer enough possibilities to keep their
own citizens. By connecting its own citizens with the centre of the city, Amersfoort
will gain a secure position in this area as well. Considering business location,
Amersfoort is competing to some extent with Utrecht and Almere, though
Amersfoort has a clear profile in terms of strong clusters in specific sectors to
benefit from.
Increasing the coordination of city marketing initiatives, the formulation of a real
strategy and the implementation of companies and stakeholder organisations into a
clear system of governance seem to be the main tasks for Amersfoort in terms of
city marketing in the years to come. One might expect Amersfoort to launch a more
ambitious and more strategic approach to city marketing after having established a
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more fluent organisation. The composition and organisational structure of such a
governance institution should be tailored towards Amersfoort and the real challenge
will be to achieve a better coordination and strategic approach without loosing the
exquisite amount of initiative held by the current stakeholders and initiators.
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6. The case of Leiden – key to discovery
Leiden is a middle-sized city in the middle of one of the most densely populated
areas of Europe – the Dutch Randstad. This means that both Amsterdam, The
Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht are within reach – as well as a rather impressive
number of middle-sized cities, and the international airport Schiphol; representing
the life nerve of the Dutch infrastructure. Leiden amounts to around 118.000
inhabitants (CBS, 2006), but is in almost any functional way grown together with the
smaller surrounding cities of Oegstgeest, Rijnsburg, Katwijk, Leiderdorp,
Voorschoten and in some aspects even with the larger city of The Hague to the
south. The city itself (in this case defined to the municipality of Leiden) is fully
developed and represents one of the most densely populated municipality of the
Netherlands (CBS, 2006). The city has introduced the slogan: “key to discovery”;
emphasizing the city’s former position as the second city of the country, and of the
most important cities in the Dutch Golden Age (Leiden, 2004). World famous artists
and scientists are known to have lived and studied in Leiden, including Rembrandt,
Albert Einstein and other trophies. The city is boosting from history and thanks to its
old and renowned university, and traditional bonds to the royal family – Leiden
houses many museums and cultural facilities (Leiden, 2004). Not surprisingly, the
emphasis on Leiden as a cultural city has been a major part of the city’s profile in
the past; and this is likely to remain so, even though the city has gained a front
position in the life science industry as well – offering an interesting mix of high-tech
industry and cultural heritage (Berenschot, 2006c).
In the following sections we will explore the competitive position of Leiden (6.1),
look into the ambitions and visions of the decision-makers (6.2), the organizational
aspects and the launched initiatives (6.3), before we concentrate especially on the
role the neighbouring cities play (6.4). We will conclude the chapter with general
observations on city marketing in Leiden (6.5). Throughout this chapter the reader is
recommended to refer to the map provided in the appendixes (Appendix A, Map 3)
for reference to place-names etc.
6.1 SWOT-analysis of Leiden
Located in the very middle of the Randstad, Leiden obviously is positioned in a very
tight competitive field with many different cities competing against each other on a
range of different scales. The many cities in the area strengthen each other to a
certain extent, in the sense that the region as such is prosperous and attractive for
various reasons, including both living, working, doing business and visiting. In
functional terms, Leiden is likely to be very integrated with the neighbouring cities
and sharing functions and facilities with the other middle-sized as well as larger
urban nodes. Leiden is not likely to have a large hinterland from which it can attract
visitors or users of its facilities, but the inter-accessibility between the closely
located cities still means that the amount of people within a reasonable distance is
much larger than the population of the city itself. Without playing the role as a
regional city, Leiden is in this way still likely to benefit from a large hinterland in
terms of population, albeit its limited geographical hinterland.
Further, Leiden is the only of our three case-cities which holds a university. The
influence of this historical and respected institution is large, and the University also
sees itself as one of the most important assets of Leiden as such, as well as one of
the most important providers of jobs in the city (Berenschot, 2006c). The workforce
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is highly educated and the city is an example of a small-scale knowledge-economy
(Leiden, 2006a), focused on the life sciences – a clustering of business and
institutions which is likely to continue to increase the competitive advantage of
Leiden. While the city seems successful in terms of the business related aspects,
Leiden is still challenged in relation to issues on housing and population
composition. The demography of the city shows that relatively many older people
live in Leiden (CBS, 2006), and the municipal authorities expect this number to rise
slightly in the years to come (Leiden, 2006a). Related to this observation, 46% of
the population of Leiden belongs to the lower-income groups, the quality of the
housing is decreasing and there is nearly no space for future development (Leiden,
2004, 2006a).
th
In the CityBrandValue-index, Leiden scores an 18 place when it comes to the
general value of the brand, while the surrounding cities all score better – with the
exception of the high-tech focused city of Zoetermeer (ING & Berenschot, 2007).
According to the municipal authorities, Leiden is suffering from an image problem
related to the perception of the city as having had its best days long time ago
(Leiden, 2006a). The composition of images are complex, yet it might be
questioned whether this image is really having an impact on the possibilities of the
city. Nevertheless, the perceived image problem also seems to have some deeper
roots than memories of historic stagnation. More current problems are to be found
in the SWOT-analysis presented in figure 10, and these observations might pose a
more pragmatic approach to city marketing in Leiden.
Opportunities
The Bio Science Park (life sciences)
Strengthening of the international scope
Increased focus on knowledge
Cooperation with neighbouring cities
International scientific congresses (events)
Nearby attractions and events
(International) students
(International) tourism
No room for expansion
Relatively low quality of housing
Low variety of the retail shops
A very limited hinterland
Older and poorer population
Further decrease of the quality of housing
Failure to strengthen the University
Threats
Strengths
Historical city centre (the history in general)
Many cultural institutions (museums etc.)
University of Leiden (oldest Dutch university)
Highly educated and specialized workforce
Compact city, high internal accessibility
Geographical location = accessibility
Weaknesses
Figure 10 –SWOT-analysis of Leiden
Interpretation based on a report from (Berenschot, 2006c)
Even though the analysis (figure 10) shows much strength and many opportunities,
the weaknesses and threats paint the picture of some serious challenges in terms
of city marketing and general urban governance as such. The lack of room for
expansion is not a problem in itself, because this points towards more investment in
quality and general improvements – but the low quality of housing and the relatively
large amount of inhabitants with low income renders it a mighty challenge to turn
this development around. Although Leiden is presented as relatively unique in terms
of the combination of cultural heritage and knowledge-based economy
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(Berenschot, 2006c) – the nearby city of Delft share these two aspects, while a
larger number of cities, such as Gouda and Haarlem also hold historical centres
with cultural heritage. Alphen aan den Rijn holds facilities for theatre, and both
Amsterdam and The Hague offer much more than Leiden in almost all mentionable
aspects. However, Leiden does have a strong competitive advantage in the
combination of its university and the life sciences – and its location and size are
favourable for many activities, lying close to Schiphol and within a distance of 50km
from almost all the international attractions of the Netherlands (Berenschot, 2006c).
Considering the competitive position of Leiden, one would expect the city to focus
heavily on increasing the quality of housing, public spaces and other elements of
the urban landscape which are likely to attract higher income groups to the city,
and maybe more importantly to act to maintain the knowledge-workers already
settled there. In the report from Berenschot it is stated that Leiden is fortunate
because it already have a lot of knowledge-workers, and only have to concentrate
on maintaining them (Berenschot, 2006c); however, with decreasing quality of
housing and no room for expansion this can be a much larger challenge than
attracting them in the first place. Cities are not as flexible as companies, and
identifying what comprise the problem does not constitute a very complex task. If
Leiden really wants to strengthen its position as a knowledge-base, we should
expect several ambitious initiatives to be launched to reach such end.
In addition, the limited hinterland of Leiden and the composition of the urban
agglomeration which means that Leiden literally is grown together with a number of
surrounding, however smaller, cities makes it reasonable to expect Leiden to take
the lead in cooperation with the most immediate neighbours to align interests and
concentrate on improving the competitiveness of the agglomeration as such. After
all Leiden does seem to form a logic centre of the immediate agglomeration as
such. This observation can further be qualified when considering that the
surrounding cities mostly consist of residential neighbourhoods of the higher
income classes, and some tourism resorts along the beach. For those reasons,
when Leiden attracts knowledge-workers and tourists, there is a rather profound
possibility that some of these settle or stay in the neighbouring municipalities,
creating considerable incentives to engage in strategic, cross-border cooperation.
Considering the observations made above, we will explore which ambitions and
visions Leiden have formulated in the next section.
6.2 Ambitions and visions of Leiden
As mentioned in the previous sections, Leiden is a fully matured city with little room
for expansion. Therefore, it is not surprising that the city focuses on quality
improvement in its visions for the future of Leiden. In the advisory report, focus is
strongly laid on improving the attractiveness of the city. In terms of international
students, knowledge-workers and international tourists, the vision of the
consultancy bureau is clearly stated, and might best be illustrated by the following
quote:
“Leiden should not want to compete with The Hague, Utrecht or Amersfoort, but with
Harvard, Peking, Perugia, Uppsala, Boston and Oxford to attract the best Master-students in
the disciplines of language, law and life sciences.” (Berenschot, 2006c)
This international focus is not limited to students but is also applied to tourism,
where the position of Leiden as an attractive and interesting destination is to be
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improved through strategic cooperation with neighbouring tourist attractions and
focus on Amsterdam as partner (Berenschot, 2006c). Interestingly, the advisory
report proposes a strategy which focuses on arranging events attracting
international visitors, which in turn will help attract the Dutch market as well
(Appendix B, 3.2; Berenschot, 2006c). This strategy is not far from the ones
pursued in the last decade, where large events succeeded in attracting millions of
visitors to Leiden (Berenschot, 2006c). Attention is also given to an increase in
cooperation with neighbouring cities, the accessibility of the centre and an
expansion of the knowledge-based stature of the city (Leiden, 2006a). Looking
towards the ambitions and visions of the municipal authorities, the picture becomes
more blurred, although several similarities can be identified. One should note,
however, that the policy documents stating the ambitions of the municipal
authorities are of an earlier date than the advisory report, meaning that it might be
heavily inspired by the content of these.
Leiden aspires to increase its knowledge-based economy. Strengthening the
cooperation with Leiden University, companies and institutions concerned with
research and education is a key element in the vision of Leiden (Leiden, 2004). Also
further improvements of the business climate and further investments in facilities are
on the agenda, specifically directed towards the knowledge-based sectors.
Combined with this ambition, the city acknowledges that the quality of the housing
and public spaces is lacking a bit behind the demands of the high-income groups
(Berenschot, 2006c; Leiden, 2006a). Based on this rational argumentation, the
municipal authorities express an ambition of improving the quality of the housing,
invest in the public spaces, and improve the attractiveness of the city as a place to
live in general.
Interestingly, the municipal authorities acknowledge that Leiden should cooperate
more with neighbouring cities, especially from a perspective of its own lack of room
for development. Although this sounds rather promising, no points for such
initiatives are clearly formulated by the municipality, except of the wish to cooperate
with specific tourist attractions or the city marketing network known as Amsterdam
Partners (Appendix B, 3.2). The ambition to link Leiden more to the region could
therefore be seen more as a reaction to the fact that Leiden seem isolated from its
region, rather than a true visionary ambition of reaching out across the city’s own
borders.
Leiden is already in a quite unique position in terms of cultural heritage and holds a
variety of institutions and attractions. However, the municipal authorities feel that
the city is not making enough use of these assets, and wants to benefit more from
the competitive advantage they represent for the city. The vision is to attract much
more visitors to the city, inviting them to use its institutions, attractions, retail
shopping and horeca facilities, and thereby contributing to the image of the city as
a liveable and interesting place to visit, live or do business in general (Leiden,
2006a). To achieve this ambition, heavy investments are wanted in making the
centre of the city more attractive, accessible and known. The ambition is to
increase the variety of retail and horeca in the city centre, invest in the cultural
attractions and historical heritage and in general pronounce the qualities of the city
centre even more than what is done today (Leiden, 2004, 2006a, 2006b). On top of
this, it is an ambition to make the centre an auto-free zone, creating parking
facilities to make it easy for people from the surrounding cities to make use of the
centre of Leiden.
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In terms of the existing citizens of Leiden, the visions are rather anonymous only
mentioning the improvements made to attract external target-groups while slightly
arguing that all these improvements will benefit the citizens as well. In terms of highincome residents, students and young families the pronounced ambitions are to
increase their satisfaction with the city and make sure they stay. The larger group of
the lower middle-class and the senior population is meant to benefit from the focus
on the other groups, as a traditional result of economic and social spin-offs.
Although this might be a bit suggestive and exaggerated, one could suspect the
ambitions of Leiden to involve a large-scale gentrification process – slowly
improving the quality of housing in pace with the attraction of citizens with higher
income, and students. The fact that the city is full means that successful acquisition
and strengthening of specific groups inevitably will lead to an outwards pressure of
existing groups. Being represented by the municipal authorities, representative of
the democratic constituency of the city’s current population, such development is
not likely to be formulated as an ambition of the city – although it might pose a set
of consequences of the ambitions are they to come true.
6.3 Implementation and organization of city marketing in Leiden
While the actual ambitions of Leiden are clear on most issues, the organisation of
the attempts is less structured. A strategic covenant is made with stakeholder
organisations, in the common attempt to strengthen the competitive position of
Leiden. This covenant means that the signers contribute financially to the efforts
made, divided in three categories based upon the degree of their financial support
(Leiden, 2006b). The contributors to the covenant are labelled members of the City
Marketing Network Leiden (CNL). However, CNL does not play a role as an active
coordinating group and seems to be of a more symbolic nature. The funds
collected from the CNL-contributors are invested in promotional activities, such as
an international version of the municipal website, a visitor’s centre by the central
station, information columns throughout the city, and other cost-intensive
promotional activities (Leiden, 2006b). Additionally, the CNL-contributors are paying
for the process of developing plans for future major events and a city marketing
plan.
Figure 11 – Organisation of city marketing in Leiden
Chamber of Commerce (KvK)
Municipality of
Leiden
Tourist Organisation (VVV)
Network Citymarketing
Centrummanagement
Leiden
Citymarketing
By the author.
As illustrated in figure 11, the current organisation of city marketing efforts in Leiden
is somewhat peculiar. The municipality is playing a somewhat insignificant role,
having outsourced the city marketing coordination to an organisation concerned
with management of the development of the city centre. With participation in the
network, the municipality – along with all other major stakeholders – obviously is
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involved in stipulating the strategies and deciding on initiatives, but the
organisational set-up does seem questionable. When questioned about the
responsible authority for city marketing in Leiden, both the Chamber of Commerce
and the municipal authorities points towards the director of the
Centrummanagement Leiden (Appendix B, 3.1, 3.2). The director, Robert Strijk is
first and foremost responsible for the stimulation of the centre of the city, focusing
on retail, horeca and other aspects of the economy of the centre. In addition, the
Centrummanagement is playing a key role in the organisation of city marketing
activities and events (Centrummanagement Leiden, 2007a). Likewise, the
municipality is contributing to coordination of activities. With an active covenant, an
ambitious amount of stakeholders and interest organisations, a proactive municipal
government and a professional organisation to coordinate the efforts, Leiden seems
to be well prepared to take advantage of strategic city marketing. A distinct division
of competencies is yet to be found, and from an outside perspective the logic of
placing the key responsibility of city marketing within an organisation chiefly
concerned with improving the centre of the city is questionable - especially when
one of the ambitions of the city is to become more open in its relation to
neighbouring cities and the region in which it is located.
The current initiatives are very closely linked with the ambitions of the city, which
does hint towards a strategic approach to city marketing. The need for
strengthening the inner city gains prominent attention in the initiatives, including
efforts to establish more parking spaces close to the city centre, in this way
increasing the accessibility for inhabitants of Leiden as well as potential customers
from the region (Centrummanagement Leiden, 2007a). A number of initiatives are
also made to improve the variety and quality of the retail shopping district in the
centre of the city, however a general trend in the region works against shopping in
city centres in advantage of the shopping malls in suburban areas (Appendix B, 3.1;
Centrummanagement Leiden, 2007a). Also walking routes through the city has
been established in cooperation with the different stakeholders, as well as a
controversial project allowing visitors to print a map of the city with information on
when they leave their car in the parking areas (Appendix B, 3.2). In other words,
many initiatives are made to increase the accessibility of the city centre and the
facilities it has to offer.
Connected to this is the prestigious and functionally important infrastructural project
of the RijnGouweLijn. Planned to increase the accessibility of Leiden significantly by
connecting it with the rich municipalities to the North and West, as well as to other
cities such as Alphen aan den Rijn and Gouda, this light rail project had a high
priority on the planning agenda. Because of its potential to increase the accessibility
of the centre of Leiden, this connection is seen as a crucial element in the
successful improvement of this weak aspect of Leiden. Such a major improvement
of the connection between the centre of Leiden and the high-income municipalities
to the North-West, the beach city of Noordwijk, and two other middle-sized cities in
the South-East would mean a large improvement of the competitive advantage of
Leiden. However, following a referendum amongst the citizens of Leiden, 69% of
the inhabitants rejected that Leiden participated in this project (RijnGouweLijn,
2007). What the exact consequences of this rejection will be remains unclear since
large interests are at stake. To some extent, this project is seen as important in the
general context of the Randstad – and it stands to reason that Leiden will not be
allowed to sabotage this development completely. It does show, however, that the
citizens of Leiden reflect the reputation of the municipality to be introvert
(Berenschot, 2006c).
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A focus on American and Asian tourists was proposed by the advisory bureau
(Berenschot, 2006c), and Leiden does also seem to have a very good hold on
these two target-groups in terms of both tourists and students. The university has
established a chair on Chinese studies, and the studies of law are very prominent
on an international level. The selectiveness of the marketing logic, however, does
not seem to provide a sustainable fundament for focusing primarily on these two
target-groups – and the city is not likely to loose focus on other potential target
groups in a rush to increase its international attraction. Stakeholder organisations
are interested in connecting Leiden more with its own region, rather than letting it
become internationalised and regionally isolated at the same time (Appendix B,
3.2). In cooperation with local and regional stakeholders, Leiden consequently tries
to alliance itself functionally with museums and tourist attractions in the
surroundings. Leiden have nearly all Dutch tourist attractions with international
scope within a 50km distance (Berenschot, 2006c). On every occasion, Leiden tries
to launch events and happenings applying to the international visitors – both in the
form of leisure tourism and professional tourism in the form of congress visitors etc.
In the past, Leiden has been very successful in taking benefit from such events,
even though the city often stands in the shadow of Amsterdam to the North.
In terms of the international scope of Leiden, much has been done in terms of
cooperating with Leiden University. Surveys has shown that the university holds a
prominent role as one of the most internationally recognized and globally oriented
universities of the Netherlands, and also the life science industry is prominent on the
global scale (Centrummanagement Leiden, 2007b). Combining forces to increase
the attractiveness of Leiden towards international students and expats, the
municipality, the companies in the specific sectors and Leiden University share a
common agenda. Leiden University aims to increase the number of international
students and staff, while the life sciences industry needs foreign expats to play a
leading role in R&D. The municipal authorities look very positive and optimistic
towards these interests because they correspond with the ambitions of the city to
increase its competitive position as a knowledge-intensive node (Leiden, 2006a).
6.4 The role of neighbouring cities
Leiden finds itself in a very tight competitive field, in fact in one of the densest
available in the Netherlands, and even in Europe. Located in the middle of the
Randstad, it neighbours Amsterdam to the North East, The Hague and Rotterdam
to the South and around 7 other middle-sized cities in the direct vicinity.
Furthermore, Leiden itself has grown over its borders and fed many neighbouring
municipalities which due to their own centres are independent cities with very little
suburban feel or function. As a typical spill-over many members of the high-income
groups have settled in the neighbouring municipalities. Therefore, one should
expect Leiden to be very open towards cooperation with neighbouring cities in
terms of both city marketing and related initiatives.
This expectation is already challenged when looking at the advisory report, stating
that Leiden is known both externally and internally for being very introvert, literally
standing with its back towards its region (Berenschot, 2006c). When analysing the
policy documents relating towards the ambitions and visions of the municipality
however, it is clear that Leiden wants to change this reputation and start
cooperating with the neighbouring municipalities. However, clear initiatives are yet
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to be made, and interestingly both Katwijk and Noordwijk – the most immediate
neighbours – are enforcing some kind of city marketing on their own, thus
individually positioning themselves without referring to Leiden as the natural centre
of the immediate region. In terms of these immediate neighbours, Leiden are aware
of their necessity and added value with their high profile neighbourhoods, hotel
resorts along the beach and a population which normally speaking should be daily
users of the facilities in Leiden. True initiatives to start cooperation with these
neighbours are yet to be made though, and especially in terms of city marketing
many incitements seem to point towards the establishment of an alliance focusing
on the different qualities of these municipalities. Unfortunately, Leiden does have a
reputation of being unable to look beyond its own borders, and neighbouring
places such as Noordwijk, Katwijk, Rijnsburg, Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp,
Voorschoten and other nearby, primarily residential, areas are not likely to be willing
to cooperate to centre on Leiden as a logic centre for a shared approach to city
marketing. It is therefore a challenge for Leiden, both to find the internal will to look
beyond the borders and subsequently to present the shared interest and mutual
benefits to its neighbours to convince them that cooperation is the way forward.
In relation to Amsterdam, some initiatives towards cooperation on tourism have
been made, although this is difficult due to the many other cities in the vicinity of
Amsterdam who is following the same strategy. In some situations there exists a
logic link between the two, exemplified with the celebrations of the birthday of
Rembrandt, which attracted many international visitors to both Amsterdam and
Leiden (Appendix B, 3.2; Berenschot, 2006c). However, in that direction, Leiden is
more dependent and influenced by the international airport of Schiphol, which is an
important element in the international ambitions of Leiden. The Hague, being the
seat of government and counting numerous international organisations and
institutions, influence Leiden in the sense that Leiden wants to attract the expats
from The Hague to Leiden. The Hague is in some aspects a competitor to Leiden in
terms of retail shopping or the attraction of expats, although this aspect is not
pronounced in the strategic considerations. Another neighbour to the South Rotterdam, the second largest city of the country – is not considered at all, even
though it is acknowledged that it might form an attractive node for nightlife, trade
and fairs. It is thus clear that the most impact of the large nodes is the potential
seen in their mass of inhabitants and/or tourists.
More intriguing is the impact of the other middle-sized cities. In the considerations
on which aspects Leiden should choose to strengthen its competitive advantage,
the surrounding cities has been given attention. The nearby city, Alphen aan den
Rijn is seen as both a potential source of users of the centre of Leiden, as well as
the key argument of focusing on cultural facilities in relation to the cultural heritage
of Leiden. Alphen aan den Rijn holds a large theatre which Leiden sees no reason
to try and compete against. In other words, Leiden chooses consciously to focus
on cultural heritage and leaves other functions to cities close enough to have some
kind of integrated functionality with it self. In terms of the chosen point of emphasis,
cultural heritage, Leiden identifies its key competitors in the nearby cities of Gouda
and Delft. These are both cities with comparable, though less prominent remnants
of the rich cultural heritage. In addition there exists some kind of specialisation
between the cities based on structures outside the control of the municipal
authorities. Gouda does not have a university at all, while Delft holds a prominent
(and internationally renowned) technical university. This means that Leiden sees its
competitive advantage in relation to Gouda and Delft in the combination of a high
international profile, a university with the classical disciplines and a business sector
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flourishing in cooperation with the knowledge-workers produced by the academic
institutions.
The role of the neighbouring cities does seem to play a profound role in the
ambitions of Leiden, in relation to city marketing. In the reflection on the competitive
position and advantage of Leiden, the surrounding cities are taken into account –
which is contrary to the introvert scope of the actual initiatives made in terms of the
organisational aspects of the city marketing initiatives. One could be tempted to
conclude that Leiden has followed the logic of city marketing in terms of choosing a
strategy, and still needs to find its feet in terms on how to carry it out. However, it
would be a too hasty conclusion since the initiatives made to this date can not be
said to embrace all aspects of the ambitions of the city. Also in Leiden, one must
await a true strategic approach to city marketing. As it seems at this moment,
Leiden is likely to remain much too introvert and cooperation with the neighbouring
municipalities might prove a difficult task, especially if the mutual benefits remain
largely un-communicated and under-prioritized.
Figure 12 – The competitive field around Leiden
By the author.
The competitive field around Leiden (figure 12) is very tight with three major
dominating urban nodes in the direct vicinity and a number of middle-sized cities as
well. This geographical position is often rightfully seen as a strength in the policy
documents of Leiden – rightfully because Leiden plays it own role in this dense
urban agglomeration. As a city rich on cultural heritage, and a university city, Leiden
is specialised to an extent where it does not suffer from a very heavy level of
competition with the neighbouring cities.
6.5 City marketing in Leiden
Leiden is without doubt located in the tightest competitive field of our three case
cities. It holds numerous competitive advantages in relation to knowledge-based
economy and cultural heritage, and even though it continuously worries about the
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accessibility of the city centre, it does not really need to attract more retail shoppers
or tourists to constitute a positive situation. In fact, the ambitiousness of the city’s
vision of itself is quite profound in relation to its humble size – especially considering
that the city already holds much more facilities than one should expect from its size.
In these aspects Leiden embarks on city marketing from a very sound basis, and
therefore has the luxury to be very selective in the strategies employed.
Considering the implementation of strategies, the organisation and the actual
initiatives carried out the picture becomes less positive. Leiden has a reputation for
being a very inflexible city where both planning and action takes much longer than
normally in the Netherlands and the administrative system seem to have a
tremendous inertia embedded. In addition, the introvert approach with which
Leiden looks at its position and role in the immediate region has influenced its
application of city marketing, leaving the scope of the initiatives a bit distorted. On
the one hand, Leiden aims towards attracting international tourists, scientists and
companies and on the other the city seems incapable of managing cooperation
with its immediate neighbours. The lack of a coordinated and inclusive approach to
city marketing, stretching over more than the borders of the municipality itself,
speaks for itself. Naturally, the Chamber of Commerce and the tourist organisation
is working across borders (mostly due to the fact that they are organized on a
higher territorial-administrative level) and the need for such cooperation on the level
of the municipal authorities is expressed continuously by stakeholders, advisors and
the authorities themselves.
The approach to city marketing in Leiden seems to be chiefly concerned with
external target groups, even mainly international ones. Therefore, the emphasis lies
on visitors and tourists, which is reflected in the initiatives taken and the
argumentation behind specific choices. In terms of attracting inhabitants or
companies, the current approach to city marketing seem very limited, and the ideas
on how to achieve such development are completely missing. Most initiatives are
concerned with improving the accessibility of the city centre, which is important but
still leaves the impression that the true city marketing strategy of Leiden actually
more resembles marketing of the city centre. An impression strengthened by the
organisational set-up witch places the practical concerns of city marketing in an
organisation designed to increase the prosperity of the city centre.
Considering the application of marketing-theory onto cities, Leiden has done quite
well being highly selective in terms of carrying out market-segmentation and
choosing some specific target-groups to focus their efforts towards. The choice to
focus on international tourism, international knowledge-workers and international
students is an intriguing one. With the rich cultural heritage as a vantage point,
Leiden wants to position itself as a real knowledge-centre on the global scene, and
the feasibility of such an endeavour is questionable to say the least. The
sustainability of the ambitiousness expressed in the policy documents is definitely
endangered by the limited efforts to try and connect Leiden more to its immediate
neighbours and the region as such.
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7. Applied city marketing to middle-sized cities
In the last three chapters we have given attention to the observations deducted
from our three case cities, especially in terms of their competitive position, the
ambitions and visions of the authorities, the way in which city marketing is
implemented and which initiatives have been put in force, and the influence of
neighbouring cities on the approach to city marketing observed. What we easily can
conclude is that all three cities are employing city marketing as a more or less
strategic tool to help reach their ambitions. The ambitions, organisational set-up,
initiatives and the strategic choices made are all parts of their specific approach to
city marketing. Even though the advisory reports do consist of some quite
standardized elements, the implementation of these elements is a very place and
context specific. The explorative approach to the questions investigated in this
study is for that reason not meant to result in a truly comparable analysis but more
in a number of intriguing observations which can add to our understanding of city
marketing as an applied technique and tool for urban governance. These
observations will be presented in this chapter, and reflections on the observations
will be used to link back to the general theory on city marketing and produce a
critical review of the state-of-the-art of city marketing for middle-sized cities in the
Netherlands.
The next section (7.1) will compare the observations with the expectations stated in
section 2.5. The subsequent section will point towards some of the aspects
encountered during this study (7.2). Next, three of these aspects will be given
elaborated attention because they pose some challenges or new insight to the
existing theories and conventions on city marketing (7.3, 7.4, 7.5). Finally, the
observations are abstracted to some generalizations on city marketing for middlesized cities in the Netherlands, and elsewhere, which will conclude this chapter
(7.6).
7.1 Comparing the findings and the expectations
From the observations made in the three cases, some conclusions can be drawn in
relation to the expectations we presented in the beginning of this thesis (cf. 2.5). An
overview of relationship between the expectations and the observations can be
seen in figure 13 below.
Figure 13 – Comparing the findings and the expectations
Almere
Amersfoort
Leiden
Competitor identification
No
Company location
Retail shopping
Tourism
Retail shopping
Cooperation with neighbouring cities
Amsterdam
Utrecht
No
Positioning in relation to neighbouring cities
No
No
Yes
Functional approach to organisation
Partly
No
No
Integrated approach to organisation
No
Yes (at the moment)
No
Scalar differentiation of both ambitions and initiatives
No
No
No
By the author.
It goes to reason that these scores are ambivalent in the sense that they represent
quite extensive generalisations based on the observations made. However, before
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achieving a positive score in the table above (figure 10), it has to happen as a
strategically considered choice, and not as a result of some inherent nature of a
specific initiative. Before moving on to a discussion on some of these and other
aspects deducted from the explorative case-studies, we will offer some attention to
the extent to which the logical expectations has been fulfilled.
As will be covered more elaborately in section 7.4, the lack of competitor
identification is prevalent. Almere is not officially identifying with which cities it
competes for what, even though the inter-urban competition is stated as a matterof-fact in its policies. Amersfoort and Leiden only commit themselves to the
identification of their competitors in the aspects where competition traditionally has
been an issue. Such identification might not stem from city marketing
considerations but probably links back to traditional considerations on the regional
economics. On the extent to which cities cooperate with neighbouring cities, the
tendency is to cooperate with larger cities in the vicinity. Almere thus cooperates
with Amsterdam on the areas of international tourism and international business
acquisition. Amersfoort cooperates with Utrecht in terms of promoting regional
tourism and the location of educational facilities. However, in the case of
Amersfoort, this cooperation is established between Amersfoort and two
organisations in Utrecht, and not with the municipal authorities. Leiden fails to
cooperate with cities and villages which can be said to form a logic and functional
part of the city, while it actively lobbies for cooperation on international tourism from
Amsterdam – although its efforts have yet to be institutionalised. Most surprisingly,
two of the cities did not base their positioning in relation to other cities at all. Instead
positioning was made based on the strengths of the city itself, without taking
neighbouring cities much into account as potential competitors. Being a city that
focuses heavily on cultural heritage and tourism, Leiden did position itself in relation
to other cities, although this might stem from the fact that the unique strength of
Leiden corresponds with the same positioning. It seems clear that cities generally
focus inwards when concerned with marketing-issues, which conflict with the
expectations based on the fundamental theory and the simple logic reasoning
traditional marketing contain.
The inconsistencies between our initial expectations and the observations made
continue in terms of the organisational aspects. Representing the only point where
a substantial and consistent theoretical fundament exists – the organisation of city
marketing represents a clear tendency towards professionalism. All three cities
centralised as much as possible, collecting the initiatives and stakeholders in a
single organisational unit. In this way, no real functional differentiation was made.
Almere does show some sign of a more functional differentiation, in the sense that
the responsibilities for initiatives directed towards external target-groups are given
to the Almere Citymarketing (ACM), while the internal target-groups are cared for by
the municipal authorities.
In terms of scalar considerations, all three cities had a scalar component in their
specific initiatives and strategies. Yet, this component was without doubt a result of
the inherent, scalar implications of the initiatives, rather than resembling strategic
choices based on considerations of realism, pragmatism or an evaluation of the
actual possibilities of reaching the wanted target-groups and gaining the wanted
effect in terms of new inhabitants, companies, institutions, events, tourists etc.
These inconsistencies between the fundamental logic, represented by the
expectations presented in chapter 2.5 and the observations presented in chapters
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4, 5 and 6 have some implications on the link between the theoretical and
conceptual thinking about city marketing, and the way in which these concepts are
applied to cities.
7.2 Three cities, three approaches?
As mentioned in chapter 3 (3.4.2), the three cases was chosen because of their
position in an urban hierarchy, surrounded by other cities of both larger and smaller
scale. Because of their different levels of development and their specific geographic
locations it was assumed that our three cases would have different approaches to
city marketing. Considering that every city is taking its own specific possibilities into
account, it is perfectly logic to anticipate differences in the approach to city
marketing as well as the individual forms of organisation and initiatives included. In
the previous chapters this has also been shown, since the approaches to city
marketing observed in the three cases varied noticeably in various ways.
First and foremost, the purposes for which city marketing are applied in the three
cases vary. Almere applies city marketing as a method of growth management and
image building. Through strong focus on events, the city proactively tries to improve
its image and alter the perception of Almere as a place to visit, live and do
business. Almere’s approach can best be described as an offensive one, launching
numerous initiatives primarily directed towards external target-groups, to increase
the attractiveness of the city and allow for selective acquisition. Contrary to the very
offensive approach of Almere, Leiden and Amersfoort both shows more defensive
approaches – more concerned with maintaining their competitive advantages and
positions than gaining new ones. Obviously both offensive and defensive
approaches holds elements of improvement and selectiveness, and it might be
fruitful to examine these different approaches more in detail.
Tourists and visitors has surprisingly been the one of the three traditional targetgroups given most attention in the initiatives and strategies of all three cities. Almere
is heavily relying on events to attract visitors and has also launched some initiatives
to promote tourism from both national and international segments of the market.
Amersfoort might focus more on regional visitors in terms of the events offered
there or users of its cultural institutions, education facilities or the retail and horeca
of the city centre. More extremely, Leiden builds almost all its ambitions and
initiatives on increasing its position as a destination for international tourists –
especially from Asia or the United States of America. In all three cities, the regional
tourist organisations are heavily involved in the city marketing efforts and have
played their part in the formulation of ambitions and establishment of initiatives.
Whether analysing on the regional and national scale, all three cities are offensive in
terms of tourism and visitors, wanting to improve their share of a growing market.
On the international scale, Amersfoort does not really aspire for a position while
Almere is satisfied to attract more spill-over tourism from Amsterdam. Leiden on the
other hand is foremost aiming towards the international market, hoping that
successful attraction of international tourists will bring the national tourists with them
as well. Apart from tourism, the three cities all aim to improve their role as retail
centres for both their own citizens and visitors from the region who can contribute
to the prosperity by using the facilities of the city for shopping, recreation, culture,
horeca etc.
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In terms of another of the traditional target-groups – the companies – our three
cities differ more in their approach. Almere, having enormous resources in terms of
land open for development holds ambitions of conducting selective acquisition,
meaning to attract companies that fits the composition of the population or can
contribute to an improvement of it. Amersfoort, having some room for development
already holds some resourceful clusters in the financial and ICT-sectors and focus
on making these businesses feel at home. Interestingly, Leiden seems to
acknowledge that companies are moving away from the city because of very limited
expansion possibilities and seem to be mostly concerned with strengthening the life
sciences and the academic and cultural institutions. Following the division in
offensive or defensive tactics on this scale, Almere would be deemed offensive
while both Amersfoort and Leiden are showing signs of more defensive vantage
points. Surprisingly, the acquisition of companies only played a significant role in the
city marketing initiatives of Almere – connected to some of the ambitions the city
had, companies are needed to provide jobs for the many people going to live in the
city over the next decades. In Amersfoort and Leiden, business acquisition did not
seem to form a major part of the taken initiatives because of the traditional way in
which such processes are carried out through acquisition organisations and the
regional Chamber of Commerce. In this sense, the most traditional part of city
marketing – stemming from some British reaction to de-industrialization and even
the rise of urban entrepreneurialism – is not profoundly represented in the Dutch
approaches.
Since the municipal authorities are democratically responsible for the well-being of
their citizens and the overall socio-economic performance of their cities, the citizens
are also mentioned in most ambitions and visions presented by these authorities.
Any elected municipal authority carry out initiatives to improve the relationship to its
citizens, if not for any other reason than for the wish of a re-election. Therefore, any
city can present initiatives aimed towards its citizens. However, when we investigate
which initiatives are launched as a part of a conscious city marketing strategy and
directed towards citizens, both existing and potential, the results are relatively
meagre. There are very few initiatives in our three case cities that can be said to
form a strategic component in a city marketing approach. In Almere, the
municipality has acknowledged the importance of connecting the citizens more with
the city, and launched initiatives to improve both physical aspects and arrange
events to help shape the satisfaction of the city amongst its own citizens as well as
attract visitors. In Leiden, almost no strategic initiatives are aimed towards its own
citizens – although many of the concerns involved with aiming towards visitors will
represent improvements for the city’s own citizens as well. In Amersfoort the picture
is slightly different, stemming from the fact that many initiatives where in fact
launched towards the city’s own citizens as a strategic consideration to increase
connections between the citizens, the authorities, companies and local
organisations. Amersfoort thus becomes the only one of our three case cities that
represents a true strategic component of its city marketing approach concerned
with its own citizens.
Concluding on this section, it should be noted that any city will tailor its own
approach to city marketing. Actually one could state that the more similarities
between the approaches presented, the less sophisticated the state-of-the-art of
the application of city marketing would be. However, the structural differences in
the three different approaches observed do not seem to have logic or straightforward linkages to the competitive positions of these cities. The emphases on
specific target-groups seem to represent select choices that do not necessarily
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build on in-depth analysis. For that reason, it does seem like the actual position of a
city has less impact on the approach to city marketing chosen than one should
expect – especially following the rationality behind traditional marketing.
7.3 Stakeholders, opinion-shapers, target-groups and organising capacity
The reasons behind such select choices are easily identified as the stakeholders,
often represented in interest groups or stakeholder organisations, and the municipal
authorities. In our three cases we also encountered significantly different
organisational set-up, providing three completely different organisations and adding
to the difference in approach to city marketing (compare figures 5, 8 and 10).
Whereas we touched the ambitions and specific initiatives in the last section, this
section compares the organisational aspects of the three cities.
However, before zooming in on the difference, it is interesting to observe the
similarities as well. First of all, all three cities see the chief responsibility of city
marketing to lie with the municipal authorities. A relatively large amount of the funds
are provided by public money, and therefore some sort of regulation, control and
benchmarking is wanted. Another similarity is the major stakeholder organisations
involved. The regional tourists offices (Dutch: VVV) are involved in the city marketing
of all three cities. In the case of Amersfoort, the Utrecht Tourist Organisation is
likewise involved as a regional promotional organisation related to tourism and
recreational possibilities. The regional Chamber of Commerce is involved in all three
cities and plays a prominent role in contributing to the strengthening of a city’s
attractiveness as a business location, meaning both interested in existing and
potential companies. Interestingly, these three major stakeholders – the
municipality, the tourist organisation and the Chamber of Commerce correspond
with the traditional target-groups of city marketing: visitors/tourists, citizens and
companies. It is therefore logic that these three major players are partners in city
marketing and one should expect this trinity to be present in any well-organised,
ambitious attempt to implement city marketing, anywhere in the Netherlands.
The extent to which other stakeholder organisations, interest-groups or private
companies are involved in the city marketing differs, though it generally remains a
financial aspect. Cooperation with private companies is often in the form of financial
support from such parties, which for various reasons might share the goal to
promote the specific location as a prosperous one, or just interested in some
goodwill for having contributed to the promotion and improvement of the city and
its image. In Almere, a partnership programme has been created which ties a
relatively large number of private companies and stakeholder organisations
financially to the Almere Citymarketing (ACM), this model – though to a much less
degree – is also followed in Leiden, with its Network City Marketing (CNL).
Amersfoort holds a number of different organisations and interest-groups spread
over a functional spectre, yet a direct covenant for financial support is yet to be
found. All three cities seem to be characterized by large organising capacity (van
den Berg & Braun, 1999, where subsidized initiatives are followed by co-funding
and where it is relatively easy to overlook who is responsible for what and why (van
den Berg & Braun, 1999). In this sense, our case cities draws an advantage of
being middle-sized because their administrations are smaller, the responsibilities are
easier divided without loosing a general coordination. Further, all three cities did
have some activities in terms of city promotion or city branding before deciding to
employ city marketing as a more strategic tool – Amersfoort is indeed still on the
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step to make this transition and can do so with a number of promising initiatives
and stakeholders to empower in the following strategic decisions.
Opinion-shapers do also seem to play a large role in the successfulness of city
marketing strategies. This study does not permit an evaluation of the comparable
success of the three case cities, yet it can be concluded that both politicians and
so-called strong personalities can have an impact on the strategies followed. In
Almere, Hans Snel (director of the ACM) represents a respected expert on city
marketing which without doubt helps both to legitimize the institutions and cast a
professional glance towards the organisation. The same is the case in Leiden,
where Robert Strijk (director Centrummanagement Leiden) is the front figure
everybody refers to in terms of city marketing. In Amersfoort, they have yet to hire a
city marketer as coordinator and strategic advisor – and the way such a person is
presented to both the internal organisation and the external stakeholders are crucial
for the way in which he or she will be able to play a strong role in the strategic city
marketing efforts of the city. One should not though that the right person in the
wrong organisation might still represent a problem.
7.4 The lack of competitor identification
Based on traditional marketing-theory and methodology, one would expect city
marketing to follow much of the same logic. In chapter 2 (2.3), it was shown that
the terminology often is directly borrowed from traditional marketing, thus
constituting the semantic framework one becomes introduced to when dealing with
city marketing. The title of this section results from one of the most consistent
observations in terms of both case studies and literature on city marketing: the lack
of competitor identification. When applying marketing theory to cities based upon a
perception of a state of inter-urban competition, it is logic to assume that such
argumentation will lead to a thorough analysis of the competitive position of a city
eager to make use of city marketing. A city’s fundamental need to distinguish itself
from other destinations in this context means that a search for a competitive
advantage is required. Both municipal authorities, stakeholder organisations and
even the advisory reports concentrate on the strengths of a city when they decide
which strategy to follow. Very limited attention is given to neighbouring cities, and if
it is given at all it concentrates on potential spill-over, mutual benefits and often
dominant cities are considered opportunities or even strengths instead of
weaknesses and threats.
The whole application of SWOT-analysis to a city therefore becomes useless as an
analysis for strategic well-considered choice, simply because the lack of competitor
identification. It should be rather straightforward to acknowledge that other middlesized or even large cities in the vicinity must constitute competition. If this is not the
case, the whole basic argumentation for city marketing is irrelevant. Cities react
proactively on initiatives from other cities, because they feel a necessity to employ
city marketing when other cities are doing it. This clearly follows the logic of
traditional marketing, where a competition where market shares can be lost or won.
Considering this, it is peculiar that no advisory report nor any policy document
consulted within this study clearly mention other cities as competitors, and contain
no examples of propositions or rejections of ideas and/or initiatives based on such
analysis. Not only has the competition not really been identified, it has not had any
mentionable impact on the choices made. It seems that marketing-theory applied
to a city does not automatically result in a sophisticated approach to competition as
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such. City marketing at its current stage is almost detached from considerations of
the competitive field which forms the very basic argumentation for its existence in
the first place. Maybe competitor identification is not the most crucial aspect of city
marketing in practice, but it does show some inconsistency in the argumentation
used to justify both city marketing initiatives and the need to embark on such
endeavours.
In general the role of neighbouring cities in terms of impact on the approach to city
marketing in our three case studies are minimal, bordering to the non-existent.
Some reference to other cities has been made, and some of sophisticated
character, wherefrom most are available in the interviews with key-informants and
absent in the consulted documents. Almere, Amersfoort and Leiden all
acknowledge their regional setting and play different roles in the urban system – all
trying to make the most out of their specific location, both in terms of real
advantages and image-building ones.
The nearby, dominating cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and The Hague are used in
different ways by the three cities. Almere aims heavily to benefit from Amsterdam
on which it is currently semi-dependant. Amersfoort cooperates with Utrecht and
does not really consider Utrecht a competitor at all. Leiden does not cooperate with
anybody but considers entering the city marketing organisation of Amsterdam
(Amsterdam Partners) out of tourist-related considerations. In general, the role of
nearby cities is very sporadic. Perceived from the eyes of the people involved with
the city marketing strategy of a middle-sized city, many larger cities are seen to
operate on completely different scales, which indeed is true – although it does not
mean such cities are not competing with the middle-sized ones in terms of citizens,
companies etc.
7.5 Consequences of supply-side urban governance
As stated earlier in this thesis (chapter 2), the increasing emphasis on city marketing
can be seen as a shift from supply-side to demand-side urban governance. Cities
are becoming more entrepreneurial and acknowledge that their attractiveness as
locations to visit, live or do business constitutes a crucial element in their future
visions – underlined by increased tourism, and the increased mobility of some types
of companies and citizens. Our three case cities all depart from this fundamental
observation and understand that the application of city marketing means to focus
initiatives and improvements on the components of a city that influence the choices
of the target-group they want to keep or attract. This is a positive aspect because it
forces contemporary governance-institutions to investigate and survey the needs of
the people or companies they identify as their ‘targets’. In traditional marketing this
is analogue to surveying the demands of the consumers and adjusts the products
to fit these demands. In other words: product-development. This includes more
than efforts to change perception and much more than pure promotion. The
tendency in city marketing is to focus on communication – though all involved
parties seem to acknowledge that product-development is an important
component of any marketing strategy.
Inherently, the chief responsibility of product-development and the promotion in a
city is the municipal authorities. A city is not a logic organisation but a very complex
mix of different actors, stakeholders and agendas. In most cities, the municipal
authorities are not even representing the spatial container that constitute the city –
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since the city is an entity where the territorial-administrative borders are not
representing de facto impediments to functional integration. However, the city
centre often function as a logic point of reference and in many situations hold
symbolic value which means that the authorities responsible for the centre of a city
should invest proactively in cooperation with surrounding authorities. It is evident
that surrounding municipalities and the centre municipality share concerns,
problems and together these authorities make up the city. This argumentation is in
our three case studies only relevant to Leiden, although the responsibility for any
‘product’, ‘brand’ or ‘image’ of a city always lie with the municipal authorities.
Although the chief responsibility lies with the municipal authorities, other semi-public
and private organisations and institutions are logic partners in city marketing. The
institutions and organisations already occupied with attraction of companies,
improvement of regional tourism or arrangement of events for commercial reasons
does not only represent valuable expertise and resources but also contribute to the
capability of organising activities and initiatives. The rationality of these partners are
following in all three case studies, however to a different extent and following
different organisational models. Whether a coordination group, a loose network or a
professional organisation is created – the idea of involving the right partners is
omnipotent and seem crucial to the success of a strategic approach to city
marketing. It is also this situation who constitutes city marketing as a part of
contemporary urban governance, exactly since non-governmental bodies are
involved in decision-making and influence the strategies of the city. In this way, “the
city” does no-longer mechanically refer to the municipal authorities alone.
An interesting observations in terms of our case cities is the fact that all three cities
consider city marketing as a all-embracing activity which need coordination by a
central responsible unit or organisation. Almere has taking the logic step to create a
city marketing organisations that is semi-independent from the municipal authorities
while Amersfoort and Leiden is still considering doing the same. However, the
standard approach to partnership building around city marketing is a bit odd.
Beginning with some loosely formulated ambitions and visions all thinkable interest
organisations are invited in the formulation of a strategy and a coordination unit or
somehow otherwise institutionalized entity is created for this purpose. Subsequently
a strategy is presented and carried out under coordination from the newly created
entity. Whereas this might seem to be a common sense approach, one could
suggest revolving the chronology, considering the strategic choices possible and
designing the needed organisation or organisations needed to fulfil the necessary
functions. There is no way to judge whether a loose coordination in cooperation
with stakeholders are less successful than a highly centralised organisation – and
therefore standardized organisational models are not applicable.
Empowerment of stakeholder organisations and interest-groups are not a specific
phenomenon for city marketing but also stems from the important ideas on
collaborative planning, citizens-involvement and urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey,
1989; Healey, 1997). Where city marketing becomes seriously interesting in terms
of these partnerships is in the fact that it differs from traditional ideas on functional
cooperation. City marketing is concerned with the ‘product’ or the ‘products’ of the
city – resulting in a commoditisation of the whole city and everything it has to offer.
This observation implies that a rather selective approach to city marketing is
needed, strategically selecting a number of issues or components to focus on.
Correspondingly, such strategic choices are often made on the basis of specific
target-groups the city seem to have a possibility to attract given an analysis of its
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current assets. Consequently, the strategic decisions are made by a process of
governance rather than government which bring some problematic issues along as
well. The democratic feasibility can be questioned already when municipal
authorities are using resources on attracting external target-groups rather than
improving the conditions for the ones already present in the city – thus forming the
democratic constituency which interests the municipal authorities are put in office to
represent.
Albeit the democratic argument, it can be justified that municipalities are investing
public funds in increasing the attractiveness of the municipality because this is likely
to improve the conditions for the citizens as well. However, where the problem
becomes more unpleasant is when the inherent rationale behind traditional
marketing is applied to the strategic decisions. The marketing approach tends to
result in a focus on specific strengths of a city, resulting in an argumentation
promoting the further improvement of such strengths as crucial aspects of a
competitive advantage. The rationality is analogue to the post-Keynesian
economics promoted by the neo-liberal discourse contemporarily dominant in
national economic policy. Such argumentation might pose a threat to sustainable
urban governance if it is allowed to influence the priorities of the decision-makers
too much. Any city might benefit from a more entrepreneurial approach to urban
governance, though it should keep close to mind the responsibility for all its citizens
- and not only the ones that fits the description of the target-groups. For example: a
company focusing on its core competencies would sell off the divisions concerned
with other things and concentrate its future investments on its strengths. This is
often referred to as a process of selling of the weaknesses to constitute core
businesses. Such behaviour is aimed towards maximizing profit by increasing
specific knowledge and securing a clear competitive advantage on elements such
as expertise, production costs, flexibility etc. The feasibility of the parallel to a city
disappears in this case because a city is incapable to sell out on its weaker
elements and its key objective is to secure sustainable socio-economic conditions
rather than maximum profits.
Marketing-oriented planning, management and administration does hold some
unique advantages if carried out in a sophisticated manner and attached to relevant
stakeholders – although it does hold some dangers if it becomes too detached. In
traditional approaches to government, one would focus resources on weaknesses
to try and improve them while contemporary approaches focus on strengths.
7.6 Strategic city marketing for middle-sized cities in the Netherlands
This section will sum up the observations representing the outcome of this
explorative study. The linkage between theory and empery will be used to show
some discrepancies between expectations and observations. Further, the current
state-of-the-art and future prospects of city marketing in the Dutch context of
middle-sized cities will be discussed along with a reflection leading to
generalisations applicable to middle-sized cities as such.
The Netherlands is a very densely populated country and the cities are located very
close to each other, which can be defined as a tight competitive field. There is
some specialisation between the Dutch cities, yet most cities aim towards attracting
companies and citizens linked to the prosperous sectors of any well-functioning
knowledge-economy. The actual incentives to invest much in acquisition-efforts are
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somewhat blurred because of the tax-laws of the country, which means that the
direct impact of successful acquisitions are rather small compared to cities in more
neo-liberal systems. However, there is no doubt that many Dutch cities are
employing city marketing as a means to increase the quality of the city as a place to
visit, live and work – counteracting on increased mobility and choice. Strong cities
are rightfully seen as important assets and economic dynamos of the national
economy. The traditionally centralized and regulative regime in the Netherlanders is
changing and readjusting to allow more entrepreneurial freedom for its cities and
regions, while at the same time stimulating regional differentiation and
specialisation. Along with these processes of re-scaling, city marketing is a growing
hype in the Netherlands, and all ambitious middle-sized cities are considering city
marketing as an important component of their future strategies. Such cities, often
situated in the vicinity of other cities of larger or smaller size are more likely to be in
challenging state of inter-urban competition then their larger counterparts. Even
more so, the positive or negative consequences of isolated occurrences have a
relatively larger impact on middle-sized cities because of their limited amount of
critical mass in terms of population, facilities and companies.
The literature study conducted as a part of this study showed the necessity to
distinguish between a definition of ‘city marketing’ as such, and an operational
definition to allow the topic to be researchable. When Kavaratzis states that “…all
encounters with the city takes place through perception” (Kavaratzis 2004; p66), he
touches the root of the theoretical problem with city marketing. If everything is
perception, the answer is definitely city branding and not city marketing – because
‘marketing’ implies that some things can be measured and quantified to provide the
basis of strategic decisions, whereas ‘branding’ refer to a management of some
external value-attribution to a city as a place in the minds of potential users of the
city. The defence for city marketing in this challenge is a normative one because an
acceptance of perception as the key element would imply focusing on perceptionshaping initiatives rather than reality-changing initiatives. Further, when investigating
the different ambitions and visions of cities in relation to city marketing – these are
chiefly concerned with changing measurable elements of the city, and sees
branding as a tool to achieve this. In other words, both city marketing and city
branding could be seen as a pick-an-choose collection of methods and techniques
that can be applied to urban governance to reach specific ambitions. Whether such
tools should also be allowed to define which ambitions a city has is questionable
and poses an intriguing point for discussion outside the scientific context.
From our case cities we can deduct that the approach to city marketing differ
slightly between the three though it mostly correspond with the use of city
marketing as some sort of selective process in deciding which things to focus on in
both promotional and product-development activities. However, the emphasis is
forcefully on perception-improvement and knowledge-improvement. Elements of
city branding are very profound in the observed initiatives - reflecting the relatively
prosperous and well-functioning vantage point of most Dutch cities. In addition, the
choices made are not very specific in terms of target-groups because the cities still
try to improve their positions on a broad range of different scales. In general, the
approaches observed seem to involve very few elements of product-development
and very limited use of market-segmentation. The segmentations into target-groups
are often limited to the traditional general groups of visitors, citizens and
companies. In this aspect, the observed city marketing initiatives hold less elements
of traditional marketing than expected. It is tempting to ask what the added value of
a coordinated and integrated approach to city marketing is if the three traditional
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target-groups are not further segmented, the current trinity could as well remain
divided in the tourist organisations (visitors/tourists), the municipal authorities
(citizens) and the institutions concerned with regional economic development
(companies). The lack of competitor identification as mentioned earlier in this
chapter also uncovered an astonishingly limited impact of other cities on the chosen
strategies, which can add to the same doubts. If no competing cities are identified,
who are they then competing with in this state of inter-urban competition? No
matter how close these cities are located they all seem to think that they can
promote and position themselves without taking the vicinity into account.
The state-of-the-art of city marketing in middle-sized cities in the Netherlands is a
blurred picture of many different attempts to implement this ‘new’ idea into the
strategic planning and management aspects of contemporary urban governance.
The trend goes towards more professionalism and more sophisticated approaches,
while the number of cities undertaking city marketing efforts is rising on a
continuous basis. In the coming decades, many cities of even smaller size than the
ones observed in this study are likely to launch their own initiatives, and the smaller
the city – the larger the organising capacity and the opportunities and possibilities of
making select choices. The question remains to whether a true selective approach
to city marketing will cease being ‘city’ marketing if it is practiced according to the
fundamental argumentation behind it.
Although these observations are made in a specific Dutch context, many of the
structural problems encountered are inherent to city marketing and as such likely to
apply to cities in other countries and urban systems as well - the chief amongst
them being the severe gap between theoretical speculation on how to apply
marketing to cities and the practical possibilities involved with carrying out such a
project in a city.
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8. Conclusion
City marketing is an intriguing component of contemporary urban governance and it
is the responsibility of the scientific community to try and grasp the true
consequences and investigate the structural problems and argumentative
contradictions. However, as this explorative study has shown – it is difficult to
produce a concise methodology to approach the phenomenon because of its
complexity and the inconsistencies in the fundamental logic of the reasons behind
decisions to employ such strategies makes empirical studies problematic.
Furthermore it is a topic where objectivity easily is put out of force due to the many
elements of discourse, perception and the semantic linkages to the more rational
discipline of marketing as such.
Throughout this study, we have shown the complexity of ‘city marketing’ and
devised both a general definition and an operational one. The status of ‘city
marketing’ as a container-term susceptible to include almost everything done in a
city or in relation to a city is not likely to disappear as a result of this distinction, yet
it is an useful one in relation to scientific studies. Looking isolated at what is
consciously done in relation to city marketing strategies and initiatives allow
focusing on the rationality behind those choices. City marketing should therefore be
seen as potentially including almost all aspects of contemporary urban governance,
yet selectively only including the aspects selectively chosen to consider in the
context of city marketing.
In terms of our three case cities, it has been shown that they represent many
different ambitions and visions, and that there for the most part exist clear links
between the ambitions and the initiatives put in force to try and reach them.
However, the strategic elements are sporadic and one can question if the
application of city marketing is done as a strategic choice or more as a result of a
hype which make most cities embark on similar exercises. Although the
organisational set-up varies between our three case cities, the idea to separate the
city marketing from the municipal authorities is prominent, which points towards
acknowledgment of the vulnerability of long-term strategies in a typical four-year
political cycle. It is further worth noticing that the necessity to organise city
marketing seems to promote organisational efforts to take place before assessment
and strategic choices are present, leaving little leverage to functional organisation of
partnerships. In general, the actions of the cities held problematic elements both in
terms of conflicts with the logic behind city marketing, and consequences
endangering both democratic accountability and sustainable urban governance.
In conflict with the underlying principles behind city marketing, inter-urban
competition, our case studies uncovered that neighbouring cities had very little
influence on the approach to city marketing enforced. Even though both larger
cities, similar cities and smaller cities occurred frequently in interviews, analysis and
considerations, no real noticeable impact could be traced. The tendency was
instead to focus on other cities as partners for cooperation and common strength,
and only in very few instances – mostly related to retail shopping or other, more
traditionally themes of competition – could a real impact be seen in the policy
documents presenting the resulting strategies, visions and ambitions. In terms of
taking their position in an urban hierarchy into account, all the cases showed
thorough consideration of the role they played in relation to their region – and
although this did not always result in clear policies, it did work to shape the
ambitions formed and thereby also the strategies put in place. Again, some
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elements where more frequently considered in a regional context than others – like
tourism, retail shopping and recreation – while other elements where considered
solely in an internal context. Both observations shows that city marketing still is in
its infancy, because it might rest on an argumentative foundation of inter-urban
competition but still contain a rather conservative way of dealing with the traditional
issues of city government, planning and promotion.
The most important conclusion that can be drawn from this explorative exercise is
the many gaps between theoretical speculations on the application of marketingtheory to cities present in the scientific literature, and the way city marketing is
conducted and implemented in cities. Further, the structural inconsistencies of the
fundamental argumentation of inter-urban competition as an argument for urban
entrepreneurialism is an important topic for further studies, and is not limited to city
marketing but holds consequences to national planning policies as well – given its
linkage to the neo-liberal idea on competitiveness and regional competitive
advantages.
City marketing is likely to spread even more in the coming decades as cities
increase their positioning-efforts and probably active lobbyism and other initiatives
can be added to the available components of such strategies. The consequences
for the way in which our cities are governed, managed and planned are yet to be
seen and realising that city marketing still is in its first stages of infancy make it a
topic that should be given attention both in scientific studies and societal debates.
A more demand-side approach to urban governance, increasing entrepreneurialism
and proactive, selective acquisition techniques are opportune techniques that
should be used with due consideration and care. Given the complexity of a city it
would be naive to imagine a consistent, general approach, organisation or definition
can be made rather than the simplest: city marketing is what cities do when they
apply marketing to their strategic management and planning. There is no foundation
to argue for a standard or best-practice approach to city marketing, the concept
itself show some signs of immaturity and the tendency in terms of organisational
and functional aspects does not correspond with the general tendency in
contemporary urban governance.
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9. Perspectives
This brief and closing chapter contains a brief reflection on the conducted study
(9.1), some notions relating to policy recommendation (9.2), and concludes by
stating the implications of this study on future studies concerned with city marketing
(9.3).
9.1 Reflection on the conducted study
In the beginning, the work with this study seemed very promising, allowing the
uncovering of many gaps in our knowledge on city marketing as a phenomenon in
contemporary urban governance, as well as several inconsistencies between the
fundamental logic behind city marketing and the way in which it is applied in the
practice. In retrospect, the devised methodology was not specific enough to allow
crystal clear conclusions to be drawn on the way in which neighbouring cities
influenced city marketing strategies. As a test to evaluate the professionalism and
rationality behind the application of city marketing strategies, measurement of
impact of neighbouring cities remains useful. However, to maximize the usability of
this device, it might be more beneficial to conduct analysis on middle-sized cities
around sharing a common, dominating node and evaluate to which extent their
individual marketing-related strategies are influenced by the presence of the
dominating neighbour. Such a study could also potentially uncover the way in which
middle-sized cities compete over the potential spill-over from their larger
neighbours.
The analysis of the three cases presented in this study present a consistent
approach, though the depth of this approach was limited strongly by the emphasis
on policy documents and advisory reports as the primary empirical sources. The
incorporation of the conducted interviews as supplementary comments proved
informative, although an obvious improvement would be to conduct these
interviews more towards the end of the process, allowing for more specific
questioning on the problematic areas, thus using the interviews to focus the topics
rather than producing another general informative collection of individual opinions.
In short, this study has tried to solve some of the conceptual problems involved
with researching city marketing and ran into methodological inconsistencies and
inconclusive elements challenged by the danger of becoming too descriptive in its
explorative efforts. Still, the study does uncover some important inconsistencies in
theory and practice of city marketing and point towards new aspects of this
phenomenon which should be given attention by both practitioners and fellow
researchers.
9.2 Policy recommendation
In terms of interesting points for policy-makers and advisory bureaus, several points
are to be made. For the most part, the application of marketing-techniques to cities
is done with a very narrow association to the fundamental logic in terms of interurban competition. This is an important observation, because the argumentation for
implementing city marketing is dependant on the reference to competition from
other cities. Consequently, the lack of competitor identification, scalar- and
functional differentiations together with the general neglect of conducting
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sophisticated market-segmentation constitute signs of premature approaches and
concepts. It would be recommendable to consider the true implications of a
marketing-based approach before launching processes to devise city marketing
strategies and set-up of organisations to coordinate or initiate such projects.
In terms of organisational notions, it is worth noting the tendency to centralise as
many thing as possible in one unit. The need to place responsibility and
coordination within a transparent and small organisation is prevalent, while the
functional aspects are given very little attention. At the same time, the unit given this
coordinating and initiating role is often created as an external organisation under the
influence of arguments stating necessity for political independence, although the
bulk of the financial resources still originate from the local authorities rendering the
organisation dependable on the political climate in any case. The double role of
Almere Citymarketing is recommendable because it functions as an advisor in
terms of city marketing related issues in general, while only being responsible for
specific initiatives conducted in cooperation with the stakeholders and sponsors
sharing the agenda in these specific initiatives.
In general, the use of standardized models, the copying of best-practices and the
idea of an organisational blue-print that can be applied to any city are weaknesses
in the practice, and it would be recommendable to acknowledge the complex
setting of the city when applying marketing-methodology as a means to gain or
maintain socio-economic ends. Neither theory, nor practice gives any reason to
believe that anything else than tailor-made solutions, institutionalised and
implemented into the specific contexts are likely to be successful in their attempts
to direct, coordinate and initiate the application of city marketing as a toolbox for
contemporary urban governance.
9.3 Future research
The many inconsistencies uncovered in the theoretical, methodological and
conclusive parts of this study show plenty of topics for further study. Some topics
have already been mentioned, such as comparative research on the competition on
attracting spill-over from dominating urban nodes or the reception of city marketing
initiatives amongst the citizens of the city. Another area where further studies are
needed is the impact of city marketing initiatives as such. Both in terms of
residential location and business location it is unsure to which extent city marketing,
in the form of specific initiatives or image-building, actually influences the choices of
the actors. Studies evaluating the impact of specific initiatives and strategies on
their target-groups would give some more weight to the considerations on where,
how and why city marketing should be applied. Although such studies are likely to
be confronted with the same theoretical and methodological inconsistency, the
fundamental logic is unambiguous and it is up to further studies to reach a more
pragmatic and objective approach to the role of city marketing in contemporary
urban governance. City marketing remains an interesting and challenging topic to
study, discuss and conduct – an increased cooperation between authorities,
advisors and researchers would be a fruitful endeavour for all parties, and
considering the continuously increased application of city marketing to cities of all
sizes, it is an endeavour much needed.
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10. References and Appendixes
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10.2 List of Figures
Figure 1
Components of the theoretical frameworks from four
key-contributions
13
Figure 2
Overview of the methodological approach
26
Figure 3
The three selected cases and the urban system of the Netherlands
28
Figure 4
SWOT-analysis of Almere
35
Figure 5
Organisation of city marketing in Almere
38
Figure 6
The competitive field around Almere
41
Figure 7
SWOT-analysis of Amersfoort
46
Figure 8
Organisation of city marketing in Amersfoort
49
Figure 9
The competitive field around Amersfoort
52
Figure 10
SWOT-analysis of Leiden
56
Figure 11
Organistation of city marketing in Leiden
59
Figure 12
The competitive field around Leiden
63
Figure 13
Comparing the findings and the expectations
65
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10.3 List of Appendixes
A limited version of this thesis is available for supervisor and the examination
committee, the appendixes marked as “(limited)” will not be made publicly available
due to either privacy or copyright infringement.
Appendix A
Appendix A: Map 1
Appendix A: Map 2
Appendix A: Map 3
Maps of the Netherlands showing the locations
and surroundings of the case-studies
Almere and surroundings
Amersfoort and surroundings
Leiden and surroundings
Appendix B (limited)
Appendix B: 1.1
Appendix B: 1.2
Appendix B: 2.1
Appendix B: 2.2
Appendix B: 3.1
Appendix B: 3.2
Summaries of the conducted interviews
Interview with Derk Knol, Almere
Interview with Hans Snel, Almere
Interview with Janny de Boer, Amersfoort
Interview with Esther Hilthorst, Amersfoort
Interview with Saskia van Stuivenberg, Leiden
Interview with Carla M. Kieft-Schrama, Leiden
Appendix C (limited)
Cd-rom with digital recordings of the interviews,
digital versions of this thesis including appendixes
and digital references.
Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
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The strategic application of city marketing to middle-sized Cities
Master Thesis by M. Boisen
10.4 English Abstract
The research presented in this study is concerned with the increased application of
marketing-theory and -practice to the scene of the city. The study presents a brief
assessment of the available theory in the scientific literature, along with a definition
and an operationalization of the concept of city marketing. Further, three casestudies are presented using policy-documents, advisory reports, key-informant
interviews and the observations on the three cases are related to the fundamental
logic behind city marketing, referring to inter-urban competition and other
dominating developments. City marketing as a feature of contemporary urban
governance for middle-sized cities is explored using the cases of Almere,
Amersfoort and Leiden – all middle-sized cities located in the Netherlands,
representing one of the densest urban agglomerations in Europe. The conclusions
of the study allow stating some inconsistencies between the fundamental logic
behind city marketing and the way in which it can be observed in the three cities.
Further, it was concluded that no standardised approach to city marketing is likely
to be effective and that the application of marketing-theory and -practice is a
complex exercise where traditional codes of conduct are challenged by a more
demand-side form of urban governance.
Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
Page 86 of 88
The strategic application of city marketing to middle-sized Cities
Master Thesis by M. Boisen
10.4.1 Dutch Abstract (Nederlandse samenvatting)
Het afstudeeronderzoek waarvan in dit rapport verslag wordt gedaan, gaat in op
het toegenomen gebruik van marketingtheorieën en de marketingpraktijk door
steden die hun concurrentiepositie proberen te verbeteren. Het rapport presenteert
een beknopte evaluatie van de beschikbare literatuur over citymarketing. Daarnaast
worden aan de hand van beleidsdocumenten, adviesrapporten en interviews drie
case studies behandeld. De hieruit voortgekomen bevindingen zijn vervolgens in
verband gebracht met de fundamentele beredeneringen die aan de citymarketing
ten grondslag liggen. De toegenomen concurrentie tussen steden en andere
dominante ontwikkelingen worden hierbij betrokken. Aan de hand van de drie
Nederlandse steden Almere, Amersfoort en Leiden - allen gelegen in de Randstad
en daarmee in één van de meest dichtbevolkte gebieden van Europa - wordt
citymarketing verkend als kenmerk van hedendaagse stedelijke beleidsstructuren.
In de conclusie wordt gesteld dat er enkele discrepanties bestaan tussen de
fundamentele redeneringen van de citymarketing en de wijzen waarop
citymarketing toegepast wordt in de drie waargenomen steden. Verder concludeert
de studie dat standaard toepassingen van citymarketing waarschijnlijk geen
doeltreffend effect zullen hebben en dat het toepassen van marketingtheorieën en
de marketingpraktijk een zeer complexe opgave is waar traditionele gedragscodes
worden uitgedaagd door meer vraaggeoriënteerde vormen van stedelijk beleid.
Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
Page 87 of 88
The strategic application of city marketing to middle-sized Cities
Master Thesis by M. Boisen
10.4.2 Danish Abstract (Dansk resume)
Dette speciale fokuserer på byers øgede brug af teorier og metoder baseret på
marketing som en del af deres strategi for at bevare eller opnå socioøkonomisk
fordel og forstærke deres konkurrenceposition. Specialet indeholder en kort
behandling af den eksisterende teori, for efterfølgende at præsentere en definition
og operationalisering af konceptet "city marketing". Ved hjælp af analyse af officielle
dokumenter, konsulentrapporter og interviews med nøglepersoner, er tre konkrete
byer blevet undersøgt for at blotlægge sammenhængen mellem den måde city
marketing bliver praktiseret på og den basale teori omkring konkurrence mellem
byer. City marketing som et aktuelt fænomen i den måde vores byer planlægges og
bestyres på, undersøgt ved hjælp af eksplorative analyser af Almere, Amersfoort og
Leiden - tre mellemstore byer i Holland, der konstituerer et af de tættest befolkede
områder i Europa. Specialet konkluderer at der eksisterer en række uklarheder og
modsætninger mellem den måde city marketing bliver praktiseret på og det
teoretiske fundament. Derudover konkluderer specialet at der ikke er noget belæg
for at postulere en generel model for hverken implementering eller organisation af
city marketing. Den største udfordring ligger i bruddet med traditionelle
arbejdsgange hos både forvaltninger og samarbejdspartnere, et brud som er en
nødvendighed hvis city marketing succesfuldt skal implementeres som en del af en
mere efterspørgsels-orienteret tilgang til byplanlægning og forvaltning.
Research Master in Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
Page 88 of 88