By Jose Filipe Torres, CEO, Bloom Consulting

One of the most common questions I hear from city leaders (and one of the most uncomfortable to answer honestly) is: what is our city brand actually worth?

Not in theory. Not in brand equity scores. In tourism receipts, investment decisions, the number of skilled workers who chose this city rather than another one. For too long, the honest answer was: we know perception matters, but we cannot put a precise number on it. That is the gap our Bloom Consulting study, Impact of City Brands on the North American Economy, was built to close.

Why North American cities needed their own study

At Bloom Consulting, we had already established through two earlier global studies that there is a statistically significant relationship between how a place is perceived and how it performs economically. But every time we applied the global model, North American cities appeared as outliers.

Not because the relationship did not hold, quite the opposite. It was because their economies operate at a scale and complexity that a global framework could not fully capture. The signal was there. The model just was not built for it.

Rather than accepting that as a limitation, we built a dedicated regional study from the ground up. We selected over 40 cities across the United States and Canada on the basis of metropolitan GDP, and applied the same statistical framework used in our global work, this time calibrated specifically for the North American context.

What the Bloom Consulting data actually shows

City brands drive an estimated US$178 billion in economic activity across those 44 cities every year. That is roughly 1.2% of their combined GDP, a significant, measurable share of economic output that traces directly back to how those cities are perceived.

Across the three dimensions we measured, perception explains between 22% and 67% of the variation in outcomes. For capital investment flows, it accounts for 25%. For talent net migration, 31%. For tourism, the range is widest: 22% for US cities and 67% for Canadian cities, a difference worth exploring in its own right.

The results are statistically robust. This is not a soft finding, and it is not a coincidence. The relationship between city perception and economic performance is real, consistent, and large enough to act on.

The number city leaders can actually use

What I find most practically powerful about this research is what it means at the level of a single city.

For every $1,000 a North American city generates, between $210 and $670 traces back to city brand. For capital investment specifically, that is $250 in every $1,000. For talent, $310 in average economic contribution per expat worker.

The Bloom Consulting study also measures what happens when perception improves. A 0.1-point improvement on the perception scale corresponds to a 23% increase in capital investment flows, a 26% increase in net migration, and a 34-42% increase in tourism spending, depending on whether you are looking at US or Canadian cities.

That last set of numbers is what you take to a mayor, a minister, or a board. Not “we believe our brand matters”, but “a measurable shift in perception corresponds to this level of economic return.” It changes the conversation entirely.

Three things this means for practitioners

The data points to three immediate implications for city authorities, DMOs, and investment promotion agencies.

• Perception belongs on the performance dashboard.
• Structure matters more than budget.
• A meaningful shift in city perception requires more than one agency acting alone.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT to discover more about the research findings and to learn what this means for your own city brand.