When times get tough, branding and marketing are amongst the first on the chopping block. And if your stakeholders don’t understand your work, they can’t defend it either.

This makes advocating for the importance of your work a vital element in any place brand or marketing strategy. But since most place brand and marketing teams are time- and resource-poor, it’s also essential to ensure that your investment into stakeholder engagement pays off.

We asked industry experts to share what they considered to be the highest impact activities to ensure that you have the support of your stakeholders…

Co-creation produces co-ownership.

If a strategy has to be sold to stakeholders, it was born in the wrong place, because nobody defends a conclusion they did not reach. The decisive activity comes before any persuasion: building the strategy with the people who will have to sustain it, which is quite different from consulting, informing, or collecting suggestions no one will ever read. Consultation produces opinions, co-creation produces co-authorship, and a co-author does not walk away from the work when the government changes. That, not communication, is the only real defence against the political cycle.

Caio Esteves, Managing Partner, N/LF

Build trust with your stakeholders first and foremost. 

The most important, and most difficult, step is creating genuine, shared ownership. Too often, stakeholder engagement is treated as standardised consultation, followed by a strategy people are expected to support. But advocacy has to be earned, through a process that is iterative, bespoke, messy and time-consuming.

In Hartlepool, building community trust and strengthening stakeholder partnerships needed more time before developing a place brand. So we paused the process and provided a roadmap instead. A year later, Hartlepool is ready to move forward, with multiple partners invested in the process and ready to advocate for the place brand they've helped shape.

Amy Lewis, Director, CTConsults

Close the loop to explain which ideas are being carried forward and why.

If I had to choose one activity, it would be involving stakeholders meaningfully before the strategy is written, not asking them to endorse it afterwards. The best engagement is not consultation for consultation’s sake; it creates ownership. Stakeholders need to recognise their concerns, ambitions, and ideas in the eventual strategy, even when not every suggestion is adopted. That also means closing the loop: explaining what you heard, what changed as a result and, importantly, what did not, and why. Advocacy becomes considerably easier when people feel they helped shape the direction. People are far more likely to champion a strategy they consider partly their own.

Joe Naaman, Partner, Wild Sage Advisors

Lead with results.

The most important thing you can do is show stakeholders what success actually looks like. It's one thing to lay out a strategy, but it's much more compelling when you can point to similar efforts and show what they delivered. Those examples don't necessarily have to come from your own destination. Looking at what's worked elsewhere can be just as valuable, especially when you can use that data to project potential outcomes for your own market. At the end of the day, stakeholders want to know what they're investing in and what they can expect in return.

Evan Saunders, SVP Travel, Azira

Highlight where and how you’re being outcompeted.

Bring the competition into the room. Peer and competitive intelligence is a reliably effective way to build stakeholder support and consensus. Sometimes that means showing how other places have succeeded with an approach you're pursuing. Other times, it's demonstrating a gap in the market that your place is uniquely positioned to fill. It seizes on two powerful motivators: the fear of falling behind and the opportunity to get ahead.

Steve Duncan, Managing Director, C Studios

Research your stakeholders and prepare accordingly. 

If you're looking for the one thing to get right when building your advocacy strategy, make it a well-researched, thoughtful plan for each conversation. Every stakeholder brings their own priorities, motivations and pressures, so a single pitch rarely works for everyone. Spend time learning what matters to each person or group, then build a shared vision and identify a few goals they can see as mutually beneficial. Tailor your message to those priorities, but above all, make your ask clear and specific. Agreeing with your cause in theory is nice, but securing a verbal or written commitment to a concrete action is what actually moves things forward. When you take the time to prepare for each conversation, you're far more likely to achieve meaningful results.

Sara Meaney, Managing Director, Coraggio Group, part of Miles Partnership

Find where the ambitions of different stakeholders intersect. 

For years, stakeholder engagement has been treated as the objective: more meetings, more consultation, more opportunities to participate. But engagement is really the means to something more important: alignment.

Place organisations need to understand where their ambitions intersect with those of residents, government, businesses, community organisations and visitors. Those intersections reveal the issues people genuinely care about and are prepared to act on. That's where advocacy gains traction.

This fundamentally changes the role of engagement. Instead of asking stakeholders to get behind our strategy, we use engagement to shape a strategy around shared priorities and identify what we can achieve together. When stakeholders can see their own goals reflected in the outcome, advocacy becomes easier, resources stretch further and long-term resilience grows.

David Peacock, Senior Advisor, Future Tourism Group, Granicus Destinations

Build shared metrics around key priorities to determine what success looks like.

Agreeing on what success looks like, together. Tourism often makes its case in its own language: visitor spending, arrivals and occupancy. Those numbers matter to us, but they rarely speak to what a city councillor, resident or business owner cares about most. The most important work happens before the strategy is pitched: sitting down with partners, learning what matters to them (whether that’s housing, jobs, local business or quality of life) and building shared measures around those priorities. When stakeholders see their own goals reflected in how progress is tracked, they stop being an audience and become co-owners of the strategy.

Tim Hasid, Director, Destination Strategy, Resonance 

Help your stakeholders to understand the consequences of inaction. 

The key aspect of advocacy is making sure that stakeholders fully understand the problem before asking them to back a proposed solution. In the case of destinations, this involves taking the time to find out what is important to residents, tourism businesses, and public institutions, and then using data to evaluate the effect of tourism on each of these groups. This evidence helps identify where priorities overlap, where conflicts arise, and what trade-offs may be required. Not everyone will agree with every decision. However, if stakeholders understand the challenges, see that their concerns have been taken into account, and realise the consequences of inaction, they are much more likely to support the strategy and to actively promote it.

Carlos Cendra, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, The Data Appeal Company

Ensure your stakeholders are active participants in delivering your place brand strategy.

Stakeholders don’t become advocates because they approve a strategy. They become advocates when they own part of delivering it. Too often, partners are asked for endorsement while responsibility stays with one organisation. Endorsement is easy, ownership creates commitment. When stakeholders are accountable for specific actions and outcomes, they have a real stake in success.

With the Edinburgh 2030 Tourism Strategy, the organisations responsible for delivery helped shape and adopt the plan. When the pandemic hit, they used it as the foundation for recovery.

Advocacy is built on shared responsibility, not sign-off.

Steve Law, Strategy and Project Manager, TOPOSOPHY

Give people an opportunity to connect in-person. 

The single most important activity is to run in-person workshops to (a) break people out of their daily routines and (b) spend a few hours, together with peers, learning about the brand strategy and place narrative and how to apply that strategy and narrative to their own business/community initiatives. The second-order benefit is the feedback stakeholders provide to place brand managers in these sessions.

David Vaassen, CEO / Founder, Brandkit