Smart City Branding

Cities of the future will have to be “smarter” if they want to succeed by providing better services and quality of life to its citizens. That is the reason why they will also have to manage their brands in a smart way. The idea of ‘smart city branding’ will be covered by international academics and practitioners in the city design and city branding fields, during the 'Smart City Branding" Forum which will take place in Barcelona on 25 &26th of September. Among them Best Place Institute experts will present interesting cases from around the world. Juan Carlos Belloso will explain how the image of a place (city) is built and what is the right process for creating the place brand.  ‘Re-building Citizen Confidence and Identification: The case of Athens’ will be covered in the presentation of Manolis Psarros. Whereas Mihalis Kavaratzis will help to understand what are the existing city brand tools from smart city design perspective. At the end of the conference Magdalena Florek will give a lecture about “Smart Brand Communications”. Amongst the very interesting sessions on brand building strategies, partnerships and tools, the section of Smart Citizen Engagement, will focus on how brands need to connect with the citizens for them to be successful. Citizen identification, engagement and activation are thus key for successful city brand building. Understanding citizen characteristics, needs and aspirations are essential when defining the appropriate city brand strategy as well as involving and engaging citizens in city brand strategy and city brand building. This section will explain that today’s successful brands need to be ‘human brands’, with some examples from corporate and commercial world and its application to city brands. It will include a review of the cases of how brand Colombia and Colombian City Brands have been successfully built by engaging its citizens with the place transformation and branding process as well as the recent case of Athens on how to engage citizens in city branding and tourism promotion in difficult times. The ‘Smart City Branding’ course is organized by by the CUIMPB (The Menéndez Pelayo International University Consortium of Barcelona – Centre Ernest Lluch), a University consortium composed of the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP), the Barcelona Provincial Council, and the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture – CCCB), with the support of the Barcelona City Council. More info and full program: smartcitybranding.wordpress.com, www.cuimpb.cat