IPM Fellow Brendan Moffett says Place Branding Isn’t Broken – But the System Around It Is

With UKREiiF in full flow in the UK this week, it is encouraging to see places becoming more confident and collaborative in how they present themselves. Towns, cities, regions and destinations are increasingly showing up as partnerships — bringing together local government, business, universities, developers, cultural organisations and investment bodies around a shared proposition.

At one level, this is a positive shift. It recognises that no single organisation owns the story of a place, and that effective place branding depends on alignment, credibility and collective voice.

But the real test of place leadership is not how well a place presents itself at high-profile events and conferences. It is what happens when everyone returns to their day job: when difficult decisions need to be made, competing priorities managed, investment choices aligned, and the place brand must move from polished narrative to genuine operating system for delivery.

This question sits at the heart of our new Place Leadership Report, developed by me and Mary Harris of Bird Global Advisory. The report explores whether the structures created to lead places are genuinely equipped to shape reputation, align partners and turn place brand into shared strategy over the long term.

Effective place branding has never been just about logos, campaigns or straplines. At its best, it is a strategic system: a way of aligning ambition — from investment, regeneration and skills to culture, visitor economy and civic identity — around a credible story of place.

Yet the emerging findings from our report suggest an uncomfortable question: are the boards and partnerships charged with leading place brands really set up to do the job?

Too often, the answer is no.

Place boards and partnerships are now a familiar feature of the landscape. In principle, this is exactly what effective place branding requires. No single organisation owns a place. No single marketing team can define it. No single campaign can deliver it.

But partnership does not automatically equal leadership.

Many place boards are good at convening. Fewer are good at directing. Many are useful forums for updates, endorsement and relationship-building. Fewer operate as strategic engines that actively shape decisions, investment, narrative and delivery.

That distinction matters. If a place brand is treated purely as a communications asset, then a loose advisory group may be enough. But a genuine place brand should be a strategic organising framework: a tool for making choices, prioritising investment, aligning stakeholders and building long-term reputation. If that is the ambition, the governance around it must be stronger.

Our report points towards a central challenge: place brands often sit in the gap between enthusiasm and authority. Stakeholders support the idea. Boards endorse the narrative. Partners may use the shared language. But when difficult choices arise — about infrastructure, inward investment, tourism management, skills, city centre priorities, cultural funding or regeneration — the place brand is not always used as a decision-making tool.

In other words, the brand is visible, but not powerful.

This is where place boards need to be challenged. Do they simply approve the story, or do they use it? Do they test major decisions against it? Do they hold partners to account for it? Do they understand how reputation is built over time through lived experience, policy choices, public realm, business confidence and community trust? Or do they still see place branding as something that happens “over there”, in the hands of marketing and communications teams?

The problem is not a lack of commitment. Most places are full of highly committed people doing difficult work in complex environments. The problem is often structural. Place boards are frequently assembled around representation rather than capability. They are designed to ensure the right organisations are “in the room”, but not always to ensure the right skills, behaviours and accountabilities are present.

The result can be boards that are politically balanced but strategically underpowered. Broadly representative, but operationally vague. Supportive, but not sufficiently challenging.

Effective place brand leadership requires a different mix. Boards need people who understand destination development, inward investment, community engagement, culture, data, regeneration, communications, business growth, public policy and civic identity. More than that, they need people who can work across boundaries, manage competing interests, make trade-offs and keep a long-term reputation strategy alive beyond electoral, funding or organisational cycles.

Place branding is, fundamentally, a leadership discipline.

It asks places to answer hard questions. What are we genuinely good at? What are we not? Which audiences matter most? What promises can we credibly make? What behaviours must change? Which projects reinforce the story, and which dilute it? Where are we over-claiming? Where are we under-valuing our assets? Who is excluded from the narrative? What evidence tells us whether the story is working?

A functioning place board should be where those questions are asked with rigour.

Too often, however, place governance avoids the difficult territory. Boards drift towards consensus language: inclusive enough for everyone to recognise, but too broad to guide action. The result is a place brand that says many of the usual things — ambitious, creative, welcoming, sustainable, distinctive — but does not force choices about what the place will prioritise.

This is why the next phase of place branding cannot simply be about better storytelling. It must be about better operating systems.

A strong place brand needs governance that connects narrative to delivery. It needs boards that can align strategy, marketing, policy and investment. It needs clearer ownership of outcomes, shared evidence rather than shared enthusiasm, and performance measures that go beyond campaign outputs to include reputation, confidence, participation, investment, talent attraction and resident advocacy.

Most importantly, it needs boards that understand their role is not to “own” the brand, but to steward the conditions that make the brand believable.

For members of the Institute of Place Management, this is a timely and necessary debate. The places that succeed will not necessarily be those with the slickest campaigns. They will be those with the strongest alignment between story, leadership and delivery.

The challenge for place boards is simple but profound: stop treating place branding as a communications exercise to be endorsed and start treating it as a strategic leadership responsibility to be exercised.

Because if place boards are not actively shaping, testing and stewarding the place brand, then we must ask whether they are really leading the place at all.

Download the Place Leadership Report: https://tinyurl.com/yehwda2b