Six strategies to strengthen civic pride in your community
Pride is a complicated concept. What makes one person proud – say, their local football team – will be completely incomprehensible to another. Yet understanding what drives pride in your community is foundational to building a strong place brand strategy.
At its best, a place brand strategy is adopted, amplified, and championed by its community. Pride is, therefore, a critical determiner of success. It is proof that your place brand captures the values and aspirations of your community. It leads people to throw their weight and their support behind your approach. And it is what will ensure that others will pick up the torch and carry it into the future.
“It is a mistake to build a strategy around external perception without figuring out the emotional core of the place,” Todd Babiak, CEO of Brand Gold Coast, explained to us. “If you don’t know who you are, why is it helpful to know that people in Stuttgart are also confused about you[?] If we can match our emotional connection to our place with the feelings of others, we have something really special and productive. We make honest advocates of locals, and we find our ideal audiences.”
Understanding pride and belonging
The civic pride study from the Chilean nation brand team, Marca Chile, provides an interesting insight into how pride functions within a community. Their “Orgullo Chileno” (Chilean pride) study, run with Ipsos since 2023, distinguishes between pride in your place and the pride of belonging to it.
“Pride in Chile is an external, institutional evaluation,” shared Constanza Rojas Bravo, Strategic Alliances Manager at Marca Chile. “It’s cyclical and volatile, rising and falling with the economy, security, and institutional confidence. Pride in being Chilean is something else entirely: intimate, biographical, tied to shared codes, resilience, and solidarity. It functions as stable emotional ground; it holds up even when the country is going through a rough patch.”
Both aspects of pride should be measured and managed appropriately. But the pride in belonging to a place – whether to your country or your city – is foundational to a person’s identity. And because of that, it is also foundational to a place’s DNA.
Strengthening pride in your community
How, then, can place brand teams work to nurture civic pride? As Marco Esser, Director at The Hague & Partners, told us, “pride of place cannot simply be created through a marketing campaign. It needs to be rooted in something authentic: the stories, people, culture, and characteristics that make a place distinctive.”
The challenge is that pride is such a distinctly personal experience. What works for one community may alienate another. However, there are many common learnings to be found from the approaches of other cities, regions, and countries. We’ve collected six examples of pride-building initiatives to understand what makes each approach impactful.
Liverpool Welcomes Europe
For Councillor Liam Robinson, Leader at Liverpool City Council, pride is created when residents are presented with tangible evidence that their city is respected, influential, and capable of shaping global conversations.
‘Liverpool Welcomes Europe’ is an international engagement programme designed to position Liverpool as the de facto connector between the UK and Europe. The initiative bought together diplomats, business leaders, investors, and civic leaders for a series of events that aimed to transform Liverpool’s soft power into economic growth for the city.
“It celebrated Liverpool’s unique story while inviting local people and organisations to become active participants in shaping its future,” Councillor Robinson explained. “The programme positioned Liverpool not simply as a host city, but as a city with the confidence, creativity, and ambition to lead international partnerships.”
Liverpool Welcomes Europe helped to reinforce positive narratives about Liverpool’s strengths in music, innovation, sport, and beyond, and invited residents to see themselves as part of a globally relevant success story.
“International delegates repeatedly highlighted the city’s warmth, creativity, and distinctive character, while local participants report feeling renewed pride in Liverpool’s global reputation and future potential,” continued Councillor Robinson. “One delegate reflected on “the sense of pride in seeing Liverpool represented and presented in such a warm, professional, and investable manner,” illustrating how external recognition can strengthen internal confidence.”
As well as driving measurable economic, cultural, and social benefits, the event also demonstrates how actively celebrating your identity and your global relevance strengthens local pride whilst growing your international reputation.
The Hague: Five Masters, One City
Sometimes, building civic pride is about reminding people just how much is on their doorsteps – it’s easy to take things for granted when they’re on your doorstep, after all.
The Hague’s ‘Five Masters, One City’ campaign was designed to encourage residents to see their home city through the eyes of an international visitor. Iconic works by five world-renowned Dutch masters – Vermeer, Rembrandt, Mondrian, Escher, and Mesdag – can be experienced in four museums in the Hague, all of which you can walk or bike between easily.
“Bringing these five masters together under one proposition allowed us to tell a much stronger story about The Hague as a cultural city,” explained The Hague & Partner’s Marco Esser. “By presenting familiar institutions and collections together in a new way, the campaign creates a fresh perspective on something that has always been there.”
Chile: The Marca Chile logo
The Marca Chile team are working to anchor pride in action, not performance, and to give their citizens something forward-looking to be proud of. But the clearest impact of how their actions are moving the needle when it comes to civic pride is the Marca Chile symbol itself.
“Between 2020 and 2026, recognition of the Marca Chile logo grew from 55% to 76%. But the more telling number is that 81% of Chileans now say the symbol, simply as a representation of their country, generates pride in them and trust in it rose even faster,” shared Marca Chile’s Constanza Rojas Bravo.
The Marca Chile logo isn’t designed to be a government design identity; the ambition was always for it to be something that citizens could believe represented and championed their own interests – independent to government or news cycles. Identity-driven campaigns such as “You Will See” continue to position Marca Chile as the voice of Chileans both today and tomorrow. By tracking not just whether people could recognise the logo but also how it made them feel, the Marca Chile team has developed a meaningful measure of pride they can use to show progress.
“That’s the shift we’d encourage other place brands to make,” explained Constanza. “Stop measuring whether your symbol is recognised and start measuring whether it’s felt. Recognition tells your people have seen your brand; pride and trust tell you they’ve made it theirs.”
Newmarket: Activating the local voice
When Newmarket, Canada, began on their place brand journey, they started by speaking with hundreds of residents to understand the spirit and heart of the community. Once they’d developed a strategy that was underpinned by the community values, the team stepped up to share the stories that encapsulate those beliefs with the world.
Alongside external facing campaigns, the team knew that they needed to present the place brand strategy back to their residents – and the perfect opportunity arose at the “Summerfest on Main” event.
“We set up a 60-foot-long experiential booth where residents could experience the brand look and feel, but also share what they loved about Newmarket,” explained Elizabeth Hawkins, Director, Community and Economic Innovation for the Town of Newmarket. The booth featured an interactive wall where residents and visitors were encouraged to share one word that summed up why Newmarket was special, as well as a video booth where they could share a 30-second video to talk about why they felt like they belong in Newmarket.
In total, the team had approximately 5000 people participate in the booth, with nearly 500 videos created across the four-day event.
“Ultimately, strengthening pride of place requires ensuring that your community see themselves in the space, and then giving residents the tools they need to tell the most impactful stories themselves and to hear other people’s stories that set your region apart,” continued Elizabeth.
Brazil: Celebrating micro-identities
Embratur – the tourism authority for Brazil – has recently launched a new tourism development plan that redefines tourism as a vector for sustainability, growth, and social transformation.
“The strategy stems from the premise that there is not just one Brazil, but multiple Brazils – a synthesis expressed in the platform message: “Brazil, unique, but much beyond just one,” shared Lilas Nascimento, Strategic Business Development Manager at Embratur.
The creation of 27 tailored action plans – one for each federal unit – centres civic belonging and aims to reclaim “brasilidade (Brazilianness) and the jeitinho brasileiro (the Brazilian way of life), celebrating warmth, joy, adaptability, and welcoming spirit as identity assets.”
Under this new strategy, the place brand aspires to connect identity directly to community socioeconomic empowerment. In the process, citizen pride is being built because the granular nature of the strategy celebrates local micro-identities, rather than reducing them to broad stroke stereotypes.
Helsinki: Promoting participation
Leena Lassila, Director, Visitor & Talent Atraction, at Helsinki Partners, highlighted a number of areas which drive civic pride in Helsinki, including seeing their values reflected in the place brand and external validation such as international media coverage or rankings.
However, she stressed one area in particular: participation.
“Pride becomes even stronger when people feel they have helped shape the city themselves,” explained Leena, citing OmaStadi, Helsinki’s participatory budget programme, as a key example. Residents propose and vote on ideas that are designed to improve local quality of life. In doing so, residents are given a tangible impact on the development of the city and how the budget is spent on their behalf.
“This is why both city development and city branding matter,” continued Leena. “One creates reality, the other helps make that reality visible. The strongest results come when international recognition authentically reflects the experience residents already have and the city they have helped create.”
Join us at City Nation Place Global this November 4-5th to discover how you can engage residents, businesses, and other key stakeholders in developing and amplifying your place brand.
You’ll hear from Todd Babiak, Brand Gold Coast, Elizabeth Hawkins, Town of Newmarket, Leena Lassila, Helsinki & Partners, Lilas Nascimento, Embratur, Councillor Liam Robinson, Liverpool City Council, and Constanza Rojas Bravo, Marca Chile, as well as other expert place practitioners from around the world. Book your place today to grow your network of place professionals and develop the tools and strategies you need to deliver against your targets.
