Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms

Chapter Five: Cities as PR and Marketing Firms: The Framework

49 FIVE Cities as Pr and Marketing firms The Framework to this point, I have used various literature streams to show the background behind cities transforming themselves to act as private-sector PR and marketing firms. First, I outlined the role of metaphor in public administration , before briefly detailing the impact of market models on the field. Next, I explained the meaning of PR, marketing, branding, and communicative cities—each the result of a selling bent taking place in cities. Thoughts and ideas from each field come together to create the metaphor of cities as PR and marketing firms. In this situation, the client is singular—the city. employees work for the government organization and engage in campaigns to foster the best image of the organization, both internally and externally. how this is achieved is the subject of this chapter. All the building blocks have now been laid down. First, metaphor and its role within public administration are important because metaphor helps us understand and orient our worlds. Second, market models have commodified the public sector, arguably changing its values from solely service provision to service promotion. Selling is interpreted, broadly, as not only fostering a typical item-based purchase but also creating a whole package people want to buy. The package, here, represents the location and everything it has to offer. Telling its story involves public relations and marketing, shifting how cities that use market models communicate (Kavaratzis, 2004). Two-way symmetrical PR (Grunig & Grunig, 1991) and marketing strategies are discussed as the ideal ways to undertake this practice. The twoway model involves engaging relevant stakeholders in a seemingly neutral 50 Cities for sale communication space to craft an image/communication plan together. The model is utopian in nature, as organizations often hesitate to give up all power. To that end, promotional elements generated by the city itself build the place brand. The tactics employed in achieving this storytelling and image propagation are the subject of this chapter. Cities as PR and marketing firms share characteristics outlined in chapter 2, and these tactics reveal how cities go about selling themselves internally and externally to key stakeholders , defined as those with some kind of interest in the place. As noted in previous chapters, the six promotional tactics within the framework emerged from my personal experience, searches of other city web sites, and the scholarly literature. Four tactics produce tangible results, while the final two are geared toward more visceral attributes, though image production certainly underlies all tactics. The tactics are: branding, in-house publications, media relations, use of volunteers or outside organizations as PR surrogates, aesthetic and affective appeal, and built environment via sustainability . A city can choose to use no tactics, one tactic, or all six tactics. For a city to be considered a PR and marketing firm, the degree and regularity with which it uses the tactics is considered. Degree and regularity are outlined further in chapter 6. tactic #1: Branding According to the public relations firm Fleishman-hillard (2009), branding positions and defines a company through carefully crafted messages to key audiences. Branding is something everyone thinks about when referencing corporations—Brand x makes me feel emotion Y, so I will buy Product Z. As branding and place branding have been already detailed in chapter 4, not much time will be spent on them here; instead, examples are offered from cities, not corporations. Branding encompasses more than slogans and images, though those elements certainly are vital parts of the equation (Anholt, 2005). we can reasonably expect an organization to focus its messages and campaigns on images and socially constructed aspects of its brand, giving another foundation for the more viscerally based tactics found within the framework. Today, cities and places are marketing themselves in the face of both local decline and increased global competition (Kotler, haider, & Rein, 1993). (Detroit, Michigan, is a good example of this practice.) Cities, facing crisis or not, are using marketing and PR tactics to ease, correct, or erase negative Cities as Pr and Marketing firms 51 impressions, because “a place’s image is a critical determinant of the way citizens and businesses respond to the place. Therefore, a place must try to manage its image” (ibid., p. 141). Public administrators craft the images they wish to project with the realization that people form an impression of a place based on its image. “Poor perceptions of a city can devalue its image...