The city branding science is new

Many mayors have never met a city brand strategist to discuss how to differentiate their city from other cities. They don’t know how to find that thing that makes their city unique and capture that unique thing in professionally made campaigns, managed by actual professionals in communication. Most cities in Europe don’t even have a marketing department. Out of the few cities that do, the vast majority of them are led by people with no experience leading major brands in the real world. In the private sector, you are considered an expert brand strategist if you have at least 10 years in high level positions with relevant companies and you have managed at least 20 brands. In the public sector, it’s ok to lead the marketing team if you managed 0 major brands in your career but you have participated to fancy workshops and symposiums and graduated from a decent university. Why is that? Is your city less important than a bag of potato chips? Because the potato chips brand gets better marketing talent than your city marketing team does. And that can’t possibly be right.