Scaffolded, Strategic, Situated: Designing and Delivering a Postgraduate Programme in Place Branding
This paper outlines the design and delivery of the MA in Place Branding, arguing that establishing a formal, interdisciplinary educational framework grounded in specific theoretical foundations and a professional competency model is essential to address the field's legitimacy deficit and mature it into a recognized profession.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
For decades, the way cities, regions, and nations tell their stories to the world has been a patchwork of guesswork and ad-hoc campaigns. Governments and tourism boards hire experts to craft slogans and logos, hoping to attract visitors, investors, or new residents. Yet, this work often lacks a shared foundation. The people doing it come from many different backgrounds—marketing, urban planning, or public service—but they rarely share a common language or a set of agreed-upon rules for how to handle the complex task of shaping a place's identity. This field, known as place branding, has grown from simple tourism promotion into a serious form of governance. It now involves deciding how a city presents itself to the world, balancing the needs of local residents with the demands of global investors, and navigating deep political and cultural tensions. The question facing the profession is whether it can move from a collection of isolated efforts into a recognized discipline with proper training, ethical standards, and a clear path for its practitioners.
This paper tells the story of an attempt to answer that question. It documents the creation and delivery of the first dedicated master's degree in place branding, a program designed to turn a scattered group of professionals into a cohesive community of practice. The author, who served as both the program's designer and its lead teacher, built a curriculum that treats place branding not as a marketing trick, but as a complex, ethical responsibility. The program was grounded in three main ideas: that branding professionals act as cultural intermediaries who shape how people understand a place; that successful branding requires listening to and managing a wide web of different stakeholders, from local residents to government officials; and that places are living systems where every action has ripple effects. By weaving these concepts into a rigorous academic course, the program aimed to give students the tools to navigate the messy reality of modern city-making.
The program ran for one year with a small, diverse group of eleven students. Half were experienced professionals working in government or consulting firms across several continents, while the other half were recent graduates eager to specialize. The curriculum was designed to mirror real-world challenges. Instead of writing standard essays, students were asked to produce work that looked and felt like professional outputs. They analyzed the current reputation of a specific place, mapped out the complex networks of people who had a stake in that place's future, and developed full strategic plans that included how to talk to different audiences and how to roll out a new identity over time. One module, for instance, asked students to act as municipal strategists pitching a new vision for a city to a simulated panel of skeptical officials. Another required them to design a plan for engaging communities in a way that was fair and inclusive, ensuring that marginalized voices were heard. The goal was to force students to think critically about the power they held and the ethical weight of the stories they were helping to tell.
The results of this educational experiment were clear and immediate. The students, particularly the working professionals, reported that the program gave them a new vocabulary and a stronger framework to explain the value of their work to their employers. They found they could shift conversations in their organizations away from simple slogans and toward deeper questions of strategy, equity, and long-term governance. The mix of experienced practitioners and fresh graduates created a dynamic learning environment where theory was constantly tested against real-world experience. The program successfully demonstrated that place branding could be taught with academic rigor and that it could produce practitioners who were not just better at selling a place, but better at understanding the complex social and political systems that make a place what it is.
However, the story also reveals a significant hurdle for the future of this field. Despite the academic success and the enthusiasm of the students, the program was not sustained. The institution that hosted it faced intense financial and structural pressures common in the current higher education landscape. With changing immigration rules reducing the number of international students and a shift toward evaluating programs based on immediate enrollment numbers rather than long-term impact, the university could not justify the cost of keeping a new, niche discipline alive. The program was discontinued after its first year. This outcome suggests that while the intellectual case for professionalizing place branding is strong, the institutional support required to build such a field is currently missing. The paper argues that for place branding to mature, the academic world needs to be more patient, willing to invest in new disciplines that take time to find their footing, rather than demanding immediate returns.
The legacy of this single master's program extends beyond its short lifespan. It has provided a blueprint for what a professional competency framework might look like, outlining the specific skills and ethical commitments that a qualified place brander should possess. It has shown that a global, online learning community can work effectively, bringing together people from six continents to solve shared problems. The paper concludes that the field is ready for this kind of rigorous education, but it remains an open question whether universities and governments are prepared to make the long-term commitments necessary to support it. The experiment proved that the work could be done; it also proved that the environment in which it was attempted was not yet ready to let it grow.
Drowning in papers in your field?
Get daily digests of the most novel papers matching your research keywords — with technical summaries, in your language.