Rural place branding processes: a meta-synthesis
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Rural place branding processes: a meta‑synthesis Barbora Gulisova1 Revised: 4 April 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Like cities and nations, rural places have adopted the practice of place branding to improve their reputation and increase their competitiveness to attract residents, tourists, and consumers. This review aims to synthesize case studies of rural place branding in order to identify different types of processes applied and relating them to the contextual factors underlying their application. A typology of five rural place branding processes (PBP) is proposed, based on the existence and dominance of a focal actor, and other actors involved in the process. Six contextual factors that affect the application of the various PBP are identified: (1) type of place distinguishing between places with or without administrative power, (2) initiative referring to the difference between political/administrative, community, mixed, (3) support base for the branding distinguishing between strong political/organizational, strong community, strong identity, (4) brand purpose, i.e., competitiveness, identity, conservation; (5) target group, and (6) type of place brand referring to the difference between sectoral and integrated place brands. Patterns of the contextual factors have been identified that seem to be typical for the application of the different PBP types. The findings provide guidance to rural place managers and communities to apply a PBP that matches their specific context. Keywords Rural places · Place branding · Processes · Co-creation · Resource integration · Contextual factors
Introduction Many rural places are facing a number of challenges. Not least due to urbanization, rural places have been experiencing economic and population decline, challenging the sustainability of rural regions (Horlings and Marsden 2014). Globalization threatens the identity of rural places, which have become more interchangeable (de San Eugenio-Vela and Barniol-Carcasona 2015), with dominant thinking across many places turning to competitive imperative (Horlings and Marsden 2014). The ‘New Rural Paradigm’ (OECD 2006) recommends valorising local resources through a bottomup approach where progress should be based on the inputs from local actors (Sørensen 2018) calling for a multi-sector, place-based rural development (Horlings and Marsden 2014). Further, Anholt (2010) writes, in the age of global competition, countries, cities, regions, and by extension also rural places, all need to market themselves. * Barbora Gulisova [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Niels Bohrs vej 9‑10, 6700 Esbjerg, Denmark
De San Eugenio-Vela and Barniol-Carcasona (2015) emphasize the unique personality of rural places, which is often disturbed by internal inferiority complexes, while being externally stereotyped. Willett and Lang (2018), in their discussion of why some peripheral regions develop, while others
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