Public value-driven place branding. The way forward?

While competing for tourists, business and foreign talent has been the focal point of place branding strategies for the past decades, in many cases it also produced negative externalities for the place residents. As more examples of the adverse effects of the marketization of places come to light, a stronger consideration for the results that branding brings to citizens becomes necessary in scholarly and practical thinking about places. The current paper presents a proposal of the paradigm shift in the place branding discourse, by adopting thepublic value(PV) approach. It calls for the replacement of competition-oriented and demand-driven perspective on place brand building with activities centred around creating value for the place residents. As a concept embedded in public policy and management literature and one that emerged from the critique of New Public Management approach, PV is here discussed in the context of the evolution of public administration models. The relevance of PV to place branding is then explained with reference to the collective, relational and experiential nature of a place brand. The authors posit that place branding can become an enabler of public value creation in a threefold manner: as a means of PV expression, as the enhancer of social relationships, and as a moderator of social behaviour.