Measuring success in place marketing and branding

As the competition between them increases, cities focus more and more on establishing themselves as brands. Consequently, cities invest an extensive amount of taxpayers money into their marketing activities. Unfortunately, cities still lack a proper success measurement, which has raised questions regarding the efficient and effective use of taxpayers money. With this contribution, we want to highlight some existing, but primarily new, possibilities for a complex success measurement in place marketing, referring to the extant literature on place marketing and the general field of marketing. Therefore, we strive to translate different concepts such as customer equity or customer satisfaction into the lexicon of place marketing, thus identifying empirical gaps for further research, as well as existing fruitful approaches. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.