Place branding sits in an unusual space in the marketing world. You have to know what your residents think about your place, because they’re out there living and creating your brand each day. On the other hand, you can’t brand by committee. Try to please too many people, and you risk creating a place narrative that is safe because it is generic; you lose the spark of what truly makes you ‘you.’ Or as Wayne Heminway put it, you begin engaging in ‘place blanding.’

Here are six expert pieces of advice to help you synthesise citizen research to uncover your authentic “why here” – without losing what makes you unique.

Engage your residents as co-creators

The problem isn't the data, it's how it's gathered. Passive research produces passive narratives; when the community is merely an observer, the result is generic. Co-creation, not simple listening, builds a legitimate process and an authentic narrative from the start. The technology that enables this doesn't need to be sophisticated – it needs to be accessible. In synthesis, the temptation is to look for what appeases, but the real work is finding the common ground that anchors your strategy: what no one can ignore, regardless of perspective. That's where authenticity lives: not in consensus, but in the undeniable.

Caio Esteves, Managing Director, N/LF

Prioritise differentiation, not commonality.

Avoiding blandness comes down to not averaging everything out. We typically combine sentiment data, stakeholder interviews, and resident pop-ups or on-the-ground sessions to capture what people actually value, where there is tension, and what feels distinctive versus generic. The key is to prioritise the strongest, most differentiated signals rather than the most common ones, and to validate them against real visitor behaviour and product strength. That way, the final narrative reflects how the place actually lives and feels, not just what people agree sounds nice, and it remains grounded in experiences that can be delivered and scaled.

Danny Cohanpour, CEO, Trove Tourism Development Advisors

Protect your research – don’t let stakeholder reviews create something safe.

Authenticity in place branding requires protecting the research at both ends.

At the front, respondents need space to be candid. The most useful material rarely surfaces in polished answers. It lives in the specific memory, the unprompted frustration, the pride someone didn't expect to feel. If people sense they're being steered toward consensus, that's what you'll get.

At the back, analysis and execution have to resist the approval process. Every stakeholder review is a chance for something real to become something safe. When that happens, you don't just lose what made it distinctive: you lose the thing that made the place recognizable to the people who live there.

Isiah Lewis, Director of Client Relations, Downs & St. Germain Research, part of Miles Partnership

Embrace complexity.

The destinations that gain most from citizen-led research are those willing to sit with complexity. Locals don’t always align. They hold competing memories, different relationships to the same streets, contradictory ideas of what makes a place worth staying in. That complexity is not a problem to manage. It’s where distinctive identity lives. In Timisoara, following resident voices surfaced a narrative the city already knew but hadn’t named. In Dublin, 2,000+ resident and visitor touchpoints revealed layers no desk-based strategy could have reached. In Rhodes and Santorini, the gap between external perception and lived experience became the strategic ground. In Belfast, the same discipline is shaping a city narrative capable of holding across communities with very different relationships to place. The task is not to resolve those differences. It’s to find the threads that run through them. In a market of 1.4 billion annual arrivals, that’s the only kind of authenticity worth building on. 

Dr. Dionisia Koutsi, Research Analyst | Destination Strategy & Marketing, TOPOSOPHY

Structure research around lived experience and micro-stories.

Place brands often drift into clichés or polarised narratives because tourism and attractiveness are now highly debated societal topics. The antidote is not more opinion, but more grounded intelligence. The most authentic narratives emerge at neighbourhood level, from residents experiencing the place in different ways. Structuring research around lived experiences, micro-stories, and “vibe & pride drivers” reveals emotional truths that broad consultations miss. Combining this with geo-localised social listening uncovers emerging conversations, hidden gems and differentiating signals. Crucially, synthesis must extend beyond tourism to reveal “ghost ambassadors.” The role of place teams is editorial: curating a sharp, nuanced narrative that reflects reality without dilution. 

Olivier Henry-Biabaud, SVP, Global Intel Solutions, MMGY TCI Research

Understand what actually drives your residents.

Place teams need to go deeper than the obvious. That starts with real audience segmentation, understanding what actually drives residents, visitors, and businesses, because those motivations rarely overlap as much as people assume.

From there, layer in brand lift data, journey maps, and an honest audit of lived experience. What it’s like to find housing, access good schools, move through the city, and build a sense of community. The uncomfortable parts matter just as much as the positive ones.

Once you have that, the job is to identify what is both true and distinct. Not just true, because many places can claim similar strengths. The narrative should reflect how people actually experience the place, not how it is described in a room full of stakeholders. Those perspectives are often very different.

The more specific the narrative, the less generic it becomes. And the more consistently it is delivered over time, the more it builds belief.

Matthew Kruchko, Head of Operations, Gravity Global