As COVID-19 travel restrictions begin to ease in many countries, destination brands are preparing to spearhead the economic recovery, welcoming new guests and finding ways to ensure they visit again. However, it can be difficult to tell a truly engaging story across multiple channels, so how can destination brands get it right?

Correcting past injustices is critical to  a more positive and equitable future for all our citizens – and to lay the foundations for a more resilient future for our places. To address these challenges, we reached out to our panel of Experts to hear their top tips to ensure your strategies are driving equitable development...

The City of Helsinki took home our 2020 Award for Best Citizen Engagement for their creative approach that invited citizens to enjoy the May Day celebrations from home by joining a virtual concert. A year on - and with another virtual concert planned for this year's May Day celebrations - we wanted to throw back to the original campaign that wowed our judges last November.

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?