There’s been a lot of talk recently about the important role that city diplomacy has to play – enabling cities to assert their own political identity, shape their own destinies and engage foreign public.

Intrigued, we wanted to dig deeper to find stories that demonstrate the tangible positive impact city diplomacy can have. This is what we discovered.

As we start to plan the agenda for City Nation Place 2017, we’re taking the pulse of place branding and marketing around the globe, looking at priorities, problems and prospects.

“There’s no one size fits all solution” offered Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance in summing up Robert Govers’ session on unlocking accountability at the CNP Global Forum. That’s good to know, but where does it leave place brand leaders looking for standardized KPIs that will inform place brand strategy and justify budgets?

If you get the nation brand right, the regions and cities can thrive within it. This key insight emerged from the session featuring input from Conrad Bird, Director, Great Britain Campaign, Prime Minister’s Office. How does this sit with the approach of other place brand leaders?

As we count down to 2017, we’re reflecting on the key insights and actions that emerged from the second City Nation Place Global Forum. What concrete difference can these make to the strategies of Place Brand Leaders as you plan the year ahead? 

Over 50 place brand practitioners from all over the world gathered together on the day before this year’s City Nation Place conference to share insights on two key topics – when to initiate or refresh a place brand strategy and how to engage key stakeholders. The Think Tank was led by Dr Keith Dinnie, author of Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice and editor of the book City Branding: Theory and Cases [both published by Palgrave-Macmillan].  In this report, Giannina Warren, Lecturer in Advertising and Promotional Culture at Middlesex University in the UK, summarises the key findings and insights of the session.

City Nation Place interviewed Andrea Joras, Managing Director, Berlin Partner, the public-private partnership that provides business and technology support for companies, investors and scientific institutions in Berlin.

As you’ll know if you’ve had any experience with place branding, it’s such a strange beast of a discipline that it’s rare to have an unqualified victory. Speaking for myself, I’ve been in the game for 13 years – which might even qualify me as a pioneer in the field –and I often wish I could go back and give my past clients the benefit of my hindsight.

In this long-form blog Malcolm Allan explains his concept of “Experience Masterplanning” as a way of linking and integrating place branding and place making and challenges place-branders to get into meaningful conversations with place-makers in order to better understand what they can bring, together, to the creation of better places.

The Olympics in Rio de Janeiro ended in samba. The whole world was surprised with the opening ceremony and even the most skeptical were forced to agree that Rio 2016 started very well.

Andrew Davis, Invest Hong Kong, shares his views on how investment promotion strategies fit in to the place brand mix and how the place brand is so important when it comes to attracting talent and business.

We live in an interconnected, hyper-connected world. Local events take global proportions. Latin America is experiencing a moment of transition: political and economic crises, major changes in Argentina, tottering democracy in Venezuela and impeachment in Brazil.

The concept of place branding is fairly new in the new world. The geographical and cultural distance between our sub continent from the rest of the world contributes to an isolation that apparently enhances this abyss. I say apparently because, in fact, this cultural distance is not so big.

An Interview with Ina Rodin from CNTO (Croatian National Tourism Office) USA, and the winner of the 2015 Best Use of Social Media Award.

We interview Keith Dinnie, following his update to the seminal text book, "Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice" to discover his views on challenges facing place branders around the world.