At City Nation Place UK 2023, it was wonderful to hear how many places are finding new ways to work with their stakeholders, their citizens, and their neighbouring cities and regions. Discover how UK cities, regions, and nations are re-inventing their strategies as we explore the key takeaways from this year's conference.

Prioritising growth in terms of visitor numbers alone means that local residents are likely to lose out. The Travel Foundation's Kelly Galaski explores how destinations can embrace a holistic approach to planning that includes a broader range of key performance indicators to ensure you can make informed decisions for residents and visitors alike.

If soft power is the ability of a place to influence the behaviour or actions of other actors in the international arena, what role does place branding have in generating and promoting soft power for your place?

In just three weeks’ time, we’ll be welcoming 200 place leaders from across the USA and Canada to New Orleans for the seventh annual City Nation Place Americas conference. Here's just a sneak preview of the discussions you’ll be able to join in order to get you excited ahead of the conference on June 7-8^th!

Sustainability is becoming an important differentiator for places. Nine of our expert partners shared their advice on how you can make sure that you grow and communicate your sustainable values in a way that is authentic, actionable, and compelling. 

The new Anholt-Ipsos Mid-Tier US City Brand Index examines fifty smaller but recognizable cities across the USA to understand what's driving domestic awareness and perceptions. Discover the top-ten here.

What can you do to demonstrate the impact that place marketing has on the bottom-line for your organisation? Mohamed Ashoor, Head of Digital Marketing at the, Bahrain Economic Development Board [EDB], talks to us about how they developed a marketing attribution model to show the impact that marketing has on delivering investments into the Kingdom.

In today’s digital world, sentiment analysis and online listening have become powerful tools for tourism boards to gain deeper insights into travellers’ opinions and experiences. Trove's Charlotte Slater outlines why tourism boards should move away from surveys and gives you all the information you need to start integrating social listening and sentiment analysis into your strategic planning.

Recent industry efforts, like DMOcracy, have highlighted the important role technology can play in cultivating a participatory approach to tourism governance and development. Cornell University's O'Shannon Burns explores how smart city innovations can play a vital role in ensuring a more sustainable future for tourism.

Each year, we reach out to our community of place brand and marketing leaders to benchmark how the industry is developing and to take stock of emerging challenges and opportunities. With the continued global uncertainty, it once again seemed particularly pertinent to understand how strategies were evolving. Here are just a few of our key takeaways from the research to help inform your own strategies…