Strategic City Branding; from Theory to Practice

Cities are in search for new ways to get promoted. Regarding the fast changes in technology and the shift from local to a globalized environment, cities are forced to compete with each other in order to become an attractive tourist destination, workplace, cultural rich place and much more. City branding has been introduced as a new and creative solution to be adopted by cities to achieve success in this hard competition. Although the promotion of cities dates back to the 19th century, the emergence of concepts such as place marketing, place branding, and city branding is relatively new in the academic language. City branding is not only a promotional activity but also it should be considered as a strategic process. So, city branding should be a vision-driven process in order to be successful. But unfortunately, there is a gap in strategic city branding literature from the practical point of view. This study focuses on filling this gap by reviewing the evolution of city branding from city marketing, identifying the relations between city branding and strategic spatial planning and then examining the lessons learned in the case study of Damavand city near Tehran. Thus, Damavand strategic city branding process is explained step by step in this article, as to create an applicable framework for other Iranian cities like Damavand which have great branding potentials. This strategic process led to identifying Damavand’s branding vision as “A Mythical Paradise”, and also proposing 42 different city branding plans for Damavand