Destination Branding Process

There are clear differencies between company or product branding and then destination brand. The latter on is more challenging because so many different interest groups or stakeholders can affect to the final brand. Starting from local people, businesses, authorities or industry itself.I have been doing for several years a research for Professor Teemu Moilanen where we are interviewing especially cities in Asia, Europe and North America how they have been processing their destination branding project. I have been interviewing the cities of Reykjavik (Iceland), Gothenburg (Sweden), Sydney (Australia), Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Vancouver (Canada). It has been very interesting project. Hopefully I will manage to finalize this research in 2012. But I have already some piece of information which is very common for all of these cities and that is we are all in very beginning to realize how we should do image branding of the city. Many have faced political or administrational difficulties while doing this. Learning from errors have been also quite fundamental. Distributing brand communication is maybe the biggest challenge.In my webpage there is also under “Training” a short video how we have done destination branding in Helsinki since 2006.If you are interested our process to do destination branding, don’t hesitate contact us: office [at] toolboxtravel.fi