Crisis Management

What learnings from the past year will continue to shape and evolve place branding and marketing strategies as we plan for the future? We reached out to our Expert partners to understand what they considered essential lessons for destination marketing and economic development teams around the world.

How are cities evolving to meet global challenges? And what does the future talent market look like? We reached out to Mateu Hernandez, Director at Barcelona Global, to understand how Barcelona is putting talent and equitable development in the spotlight as they work towards recovery.

The smartest response isn’t to just recreate the same processes as we were used to pre-pandemic, but to understand how we can refine and improve our everyday ‘normal’. The pandemic has exposed our weaknesses and now we need to ensure that we address these in order to be more resilient against future shocks.

"The future of the city is the future of us. It’s who we are," says Jonathan Woetzel, McKinsey Global Institute. The question, then, is what changes do we need to make to bring people back to the city? And how do we do this safely, equitably, and in a way that makes us more resilient to future shocks?

We talked last week about the importance of having reputational resilience as a place brand or marketing organisation, but of course, this is only one facet of the solution. You have to be able to secure the future of your own organisation to be able to continue delivering on your place brand and place marketing success.

The pandemic has sparked an entirely new vocabulary. And now the word “resilience” has continued to rise up the ranks to take centre stage. But what is resilience? What do we mean by it in relation to city or nation branding?

How do you market a destination to people who are not allowed to visit and keep an industry alive when it is not allowed to operate? The answer: You get them to keep dreaming of the one day that they can. Discover more about the Western Cape's award-winning strategy here.

Vilnius caught the attention of the world with their innovative strategies to support their citizens and businesses throughout the pandemic. We reached out to the Director of Go Vilnius, Inga Romanovskiene, to understand more about their place branding strategy - and to discover the secret to using humour successfully in your marketing.

International relations are at a crossroad. With so much upheaval comes an intense international scrutiny on how countries are managing their reputations.

The potential reputational risks involved in communicating about and during COVID-19 are many. But here are a few things that should be considered when deciding how to handle communications in a world turned upside down by this crisis.