Abstract
Harnessing Place Branding through Cultural Entrepreneurship analyses current issues on place branding and provides a clear linkage with the entrepreneurial aspects rooted in culture.
Many tourist destinations often boast the same resources and many lack differentiation (Morgan et al., 2011). For this reason, the idea of place branding is gaining importance (Hankinson, 2004). An effective implementation of place branding programmes must take into account the consensus among stakeholders, unity, clarity and consistency in the vision (Papadopoulos, 2004; Vitiello and Willcocks, 2006, 2011), which can be further exacerbated through creativity, branding, entrepreneurship and creative industries. This book bridges the gap between academic theories, frameworks and practical case studies.
The book focuses on the roles of cultural entrepreneurship, the creative industries context and how these two key aspects harness a competitive value chain development in a sustainable way. There is an important link between place branding and entrepreneurship as a society of entrepreneurs thus guaranteeing differential elements to the destination. The more creative, innovative and entrepreneurial the society is the better for the place branding, the economic development and its sustainable growth. The creative industries’ context becomes a fascinating potential area of exploration as it offers multiple options to develop resources that are usually underused from a destination point of view and convert them into products for wider audiences. Despite this growing interest, tourism place brands can only develop when the need to harness stakeholder’s collaboration is fully embraced. This stakeholder harness is sometimes a gap between the academia and the practice, and it proves very difficult to achieve. Even though this book emphasises this aspect, further practical recommendations and solutions through real examples could have been provided.
The book consists of three parts. The first part discusses the multidisciplinary aspects of place branding reviewing the relationship between culture and place branding, proposing tools for planners to develop through existing cultural resources. The following chapters provide an interesting debate on the limitations.
The second part provides the reader with a variety of case studies that demonstrate and support previous knowledge. However, as it is an edited book, the contribution of the different case studies is not homogenous and they reinforce the gap in stakeholder harnessing and governance between theory and practice lacking specific recommendations.
The third part refers to specific place brand themes stressing the coordination of cooperative cultural networks as it is a growing area of interest intrinsic to place brands. Moreover, this cooperation is further linked to education and in particular at Higher Education level. This is of paramount importance because educating the future generations of entrepreneurs will provide a sense of preparedness and readiness. Besides, this book considers two more themes that must be fully understood to effectively harness place branding in cultural entrepreneurship. One theme is the communication approach deployed for the place branding and the second theme is the engagement of stakeholders with the new types of media. The final section offers practical tools for place brands, providing empirical evidence and examples of good practices. Even though the topics addressed in this section are interesting, the varied and broad approach makes the section disjointed with the previous flow and structure of the book. However, the input provided proves very interesting for undergraduate students as it is up to date and easy to read.
The content of this book travels through theoretical frameworks to specific examples for practitioners. It therefore is applicable to both professionals and academics in the field of tourism development and branding, as well as to private businesses, public organisations and Destination Marketing Organisations. It is of relevance that the book addresses different audiences and its style, structure and layout allows the reader to find different types of information for a variety of purposes. Nevertheless, the book is clearly and succinctly written. The book merges two very important aspects of development. One aspect is entrepreneurship with special emphasis on culture in providing sustainable growth. The second aspect is place brands, which encourage further investment and developments. Cultural entrepreneurship creates a circle where the attributes for planning a successful place brand can take place.