How much should place brands listen to their community?
Every place branding project eventually arrives at the same question: How much should local stakeholders influence the outcome?
In recent years, the answer has increasingly become “as much as possible.”
Community engagement, co-creation and local ownership have become guiding principles across place branding, and that's largely a positive development. After all, the mandates involved across investor, talent and visitor attraction are ultimately for the benefit of the citizens each organisation represents. The best place brands often emerge from the people, culture and ambitions that make a place distinctive.
But somewhere along the way, local stakeholder involvement has taken the form of universal rule rather than strategic choice. In fact, the right amount of community input depends entirely on what you're trying to achieve.
A civic place brand designed to build local pride requires a very different process than an international investment campaign. A tourism strategy isn't developed the same way as a talent attraction programme. Yet it is tempting to apply the same engagement model regardless of the objective.
While the intentions are right, the outcomes can become misaligned. This conundrum has bubbled up in several conversations that I’ve had with various place brand leaders in recent months. Below, I share some thoughts on how to think about this.
The wrong audience can answer the wrong question
Let’s start with the obvious: stakeholders and target audiences play different roles. Local stakeholders help answer questions like:
What makes this place unique?
Which values define us?
What history and culture should never be lost?
Where are our ambitions headed?
External audiences answer equally important, but completely different, questions.
Why would I invest here?
Why should I move here?
What problem does this place solve for me?
How is this different from the other places I'm considering?
Confusing these perspectives, or indexing them incorrectly based on the project, creates problems.
Over-index on local opinion and you risk creating something deeply meaningful internally, but largely irrelevant externally. Ignore local perspectives entirely and you risk creating a story that attracts attention but feels disconnected from reality, making it difficult for residents, businesses and institutions to support over the long term.
Neither extreme produces a desireable brand, initiative, or campaign.
Not all place branding is created equal
One reason this debate persists is that we often use "place branding" to describe very different kinds of work. Some initiatives are primarily about civic identity, while others exist almost entirely to influence external behaviour.
City Nation Place attempts to bring some clarity here with their definitions of place branding and marketing. That’s a great start, but even within these categories, there is plenty of gray space for interpretation.
No matter the definition or discipline, each requires different levels of stakeholder involvement. If you're developing a long-term holistic place brand that represents the identity of a city or region, local voices should carry significant weight. The goal is to understand the values, aspirations and characteristics that genuinely define the place.
If you're developing an international investment or talent attraction campaign, however, the focus flips. Investors and talent choose locations for very different reasons while holding very different perceptions that can conflict with the inside view of a destination.
Local stakeholders still matter, of course. They provide context, identify strengths, surface sensitivities and help ensure the story is credible. But there is a powerful filter through which their input must be weighed and distilled.
A strong brand connects two realities
When speaking with clients around topics related to branding and marketing, we often talk about the ABCD’s of a strong place identity:
· Authentic. Grounded in the genuine characteristics of the place.
· Believable. Supported by data, facts and success stories rather than aspiration.
· Connected. Relevant to the needs, motivations and priorities of the audience you're trying to influence.
· Distinctive. Giving people a reason to choose your place over another.
Authenticity is inspired by local perspectives, while Connectivity is rooted is external needs (unless your initiative is around civic pride, in which case that too stems from internal discussions). Believability and Distinctiveness are a blend of both.
With almost any place, there is an outside story and an inside story. Great place brands and campaigns are often able to bridge this gap. Getting to that sweet spot involves a mix of perspectives, but what’s the right balance?
There isn't a magic ratio
People often ask how much stakeholder input is enough. Sadly, there isn't a universal answer, but there are useful guidelines.
A civic programme might derive nearly all of its insight from local stakeholders. A holistic place brand initiative, meanwhile, may invite as much as 80% from the same group, with 20% from external audiences. The more internationally aspirational a place brand is, the more the weighting may shift into the middle.
Conversely, an international investment brand for an IPA might invert that balance, relying primarily on external market understanding while using stakeholder engagement to ensure authenticity and organisational alignment.
Large, brand-building, external-facing campaigns are still further encouraged to seek input from the outside, all the while incorporating local voices in the execution and using local input as a guardrail.
The point is less about the exact ratio and is more about recognising that the ratio changes depending on the objectives, audience and outcomes desired. Perhaps that is an obvious take, but one that felt like emphasising in the current climate.
Here’s another way to think about stakeholder involvement based on the type of challenge you are trying to solve.
Systemic challenges
These sit at the heart of a place's identity and long-term direction. Developing a place brand, defining a shared vision, or strengthening civic pride all fall into this category. Because these initiatives shape how a place understands itself, they should lean heavily on local stakeholders. Even here, however, external perspectives remain valuable if the long-term ambition is to attract investors, talent or visitors.
Strategic challenges
This is the middle ground, where the appropriate level of engagement becomes less clear-cut. Projects such as refining a sector proposition, developing a talent strategy or repositioning an existing brand may benefit from targeted stakeholder input rather than broad consultation. If meaningful engagement has already taken place elsewhere, the missing insight may come not from asking locals more questions, but from better understanding external audiences.
Execution challenges
Once the strategic direction has been established, the emphasis shifts from consultation to execution. Campaigns, creative development, messaging and tactical initiatives should be informed by the intelligence already gathered, not continually reopened for debate. If the objective is external, the work should be judged primarily by how well it resonates with external audiences, while remaining authentic to the place it represents.
So, what challenge are you facing and which bucket does this fall into? That is the first line of consideration.
What good stakeholder engagement actually looks like
Effective engagement is about understanding which perspectives help answer which questions, not accepting every opinion. Good stakeholder engagement:
uncovers the values that genuinely define a place;
identifies blind spots and political realities;
tests whether the proposed story feels credible internally;
raises opportunities that data alone might miss;
and continues over time as places evolve.
It doesn't require every stakeholder to approve every message. Marketing ultimately requires making choices, and not every truth deserves equal prominence. Some characteristics are more meaningful to external audiences than others; the same is true for internal ones. The role of place strategy is deciding which ones are appropriate for the task at hand.
Locals are experts in the place they live, with the exception that they often see flaws more than opportunities. External audiences are experts in the decisions they make, with the exception that what they want isn’t always best for the destination of choice.
Place branding and marketing initiatives require understanding both, along with which voice should carry the greatest weight for the challenge in question.
