Brand New City : A Place marketing study on Jönköping

Abstract: Traditionally, branding is all about differentiate the product from its competi-tors. When the brand is a place another level of complexity is added. A place has several different stakeholders that all have to communicate the same mes-sage in order to create a strong brand. Place marketing is a rather new theoreti-cal field and not many researchers have explored this phenomenon, therefore, there does not exist any common practice within this line of study. Compared to a product the stakeholders of a city often have quite different objectives, and therefore there is a risk that they communicate messages that contradict each other. Which features of a city is needed to create a strong brand? The purpose of this thesis was to expore how the stakeholders within the city of Jönköping can cooperate in order to build a strong city brand. The authors have chosen to focus on a qualitative method and personal inter-views as the primary source of information. The respondents that participated in this study were influential persons in leading positions within the main stakeholder groups in Jönköping, that is the public sector, the private sector and the university. Further the Managing Director of FMJ was interview. In order to determine, which of these stakeholders that were of interest the authours have used the snowball approach. To complement these findings secondary data, including three attitude surveys, have been analysed. The authors have concluded that Jönköping does possess a few quite strong brand associations, however, the problem that the city has is the lack of an suf-ficient product to sell. A couple of years ago Jönköping established FMJ to take care of the external marketing and since than it has been many improve-ments, nevertheless the authors believe that another form of cooperation is needed. The city would have to develop a new organization with the base within the municipality, but it should include all the important stakeholders. The main tasks of this cooperation would be to integrate these stakeholders and build a strong product, which should emphasis the most important fea-tures of the Jönköping.