Branding Governance challenges traditional thinking on brands. Bestselling author Nicholas Ind and cross-cultural communications expert Rune Bjerke expose the flaws in a marketing-led approach to brand-building, and offer in its place a highly-participative, organization-wide process that delivers fulfillment to employees and value to customers. Drawing on a wide range of sources, they show that the key to a participatory approach is that customers and other external audiences must join managers and employees as active participants in defining and developing the brand. This requires the relationship between organization and customer to be one of trust, respect and authenticity.

Globalization affects urban communities in many ways. One of its manifestations is increased intercity competition, which compels cities to increase their attractiveness in terms of capital, entrepreneurship, information, expertise and consumption. This competition takes place in an asymmetric field, with cities trying to find the best possible ways of using their natural and created assets, the latter including a naturally evolving reputation or consciously developed competitive identity or brand. The Political Economy of City Branding discusses this phenomenon from the perspective of numerous post-industrial cities in North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia. Special attention is given to local economic development policy and industrial profiling, and global city rankings are used to provide empirical evidence for cities’ characteristics and positions in the global urban hierarchy. On top of this, social and urban challenges such as creative class struggle are also discussed. The core message of the book is that cities should apply the tools of city branding in their industrial promotion and specialization, but at the same time take into account the special nature of their urban communities and be open and inclusive in their brand policies in order to ensure optimal results. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of local economic development, urban planning, public management, and branding.

Bringing together different theoretical perspectives on brand co-creation and discussing their practical applicability and ethical implications, this Research Handbook explores emerging notions of brand construction which view brands as co-created through collaborative efforts between multiple stakeholders.

This Research Agenda documents and establishes the thinking of leading scholars in the field of political marketing and related sub-fields, also encompassing additional social science disciplines that intersect at the crossroads of political marketing.

The last two decades have been an exciting and richly productive period for debate and academic research on the city. The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies offers comprehensive coverage of this modern re-thinking of urban theory, both gathering together the best of what has been achieved so far, and signalling the way to future theoretical insights and empirically grounded research. Featuring many of the top international names in the field, the handbook is divided into nine key sections: SECTION 1: THE GLOBALIZED CITY SECTION 2: URBAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM, BRANDING, GOVERNANCE SECTION 3: MARGINALITY, RISK AND RESILIENCE SECTION 4: SUBURBS AND SUBURBANIZATION: STRATIFICATION, SPRAWL, SUSTAINABILITY SECTION 5: DISTINCTIVE AND VISIBLE CITIES SECTION 6: CREATIVE CITIES SECTION 7: URBANIZATION, URBANITY AND URBAN LIFESTYLES SECTION 8: NEW DIRECTIONS IN URBAN THEORY SECTION 9: URBAN FUTURES This is a central resource for researchers and students of Sociology, Cultural Geography and Urban Studies.