Cleveland
A city that closed the gap between its reputation and its reality
Most places try to change how they are seen by saying something different about themselves. Cleveland's transformation has worked the other way round. Rather than reach for a new story, the city's destination marketing organization invested in the essence of the city’s history and cultural core until perception had no choice but to catch up. What outsiders are starting to notice now is not a rebrand. It is a city that has quietly closed the distance between how it is perceived and what it has actually become.
From Industrial Legacy to Civic Confidence
Cleveland's modern reputation was shaped by industrial decline and the decades of population loss that followed, a narrative that calcified long after the city itself had begun to move past it. The interesting part of Cleveland's story is not that the world misjudged it. Outside perception was, for a long stretch, a reasonably accurate read of a city in difficulty. What changed is that Cleveland kept building anyway, and the gap between the old read and the new reality simply grew until it became impossible to ignore.
Local pride did much of the early work that marketing later inherited. “The Land” is the clearest example. It began as a name Clevelanders gave themselves, carried into wider culture by the city's own Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and claimed by LeBron James in 2014 as shorthand for a place he returned to – his hometown team. At the same time Destination Cleveland started building a civic platform around it, leveraging the identity that already belonged to the people who lived there rather than inventing something else in its place.
That sequencing matters more than it might first appear. Confidence that starts at street level and is later given institutional shape tends to last. Confidence manufactured by an agency and handed down rarely does.
Transformation began when Cleveland stopped defining itself by what it had lost and started investing in what made it distinctive.
Where Institutions Work Together
Most places separate the work of tourism, economic development, talent attraction and civic leadership into different organisations with different mandates and little reason to speak to one another. Cleveland has moved in the opposite direction, treating these as expressions of a single underlying effort rather than competing lines of business.
Destination Cleveland, Greater Cleveland Partnership and a wider layer of civic organisations now operate with enough shared purpose that collaboration is a central focus and understood necessity for the city to advance. All have maintained their core mandate and have agreed on what they are collectively trying to prove.
Cleveland's competitive advantage lies in the ability of its institutions to align around common outcomes while maintaining distinct mandates.
The clearest expression of this is the Cleveland Talent Alliance, a coalition Destination Cleveland and Greater Cleveland Partnership convene alongside another dozen public, private and non-profit partners. Destination Cleveland’s presence here is structural rather than simply promotional: proof that a destination marketing organisation can sit at the centre of a talent and population strategy without losing sight of why it exists in the first place. The Alliance's own programmes and results belong to a separate feature; what belongs here is the fact of the coalition itself, and what it says about how Cleveland has chosen to organise its ambitions.
Place Leadership Beyond Tourism
Destination Cleveland's role here is easy to misdescribe as a destination marketing organisation that has branched out into talent attraction. The sequence David Gilbert describes in the interview below is more deliberate than that. Visitation comes first, not as an end in itself but as the mechanism by which someone's perception of Cleveland starts to shift, from a place they assumed they knew to a place they have actually experienced. Talent attraction draws directly on that shift rather than running alongside it.
Seen this way, tourism is not something Destination Cleveland is moving beyond. It is and will always be the organisation’s primary job. And it is the instrument that makes everything that follows possible, the first and most persuasive answer to a visitor's quiet, unspoken question of whether this might also be a place to live.
Quality of place, reputation management and civic leadership all flow from that same premise: that the most convincing way to change what people think of a city is to let them stand in it.
Behind the Scenes — Interview with David Gilbert
David Gilbert leads both Destination Cleveland and Greater Cleveland Sports Commission, a dual mandate he has held since 2011 and 2000 respectively, giving him one of the longer continuous vantage points on the city's repositioning of any executive in the sector.
In November 2025, City Nation Place named him the recipient of its international Leadership Award, voted on by a global panel of peers in the place branding field. The citation credited him with delivering measurable impact on civic pride through a community-first approach to place branding, which amounts to outside confirmation of the argument this showcase is making in its own words.
Why the Cleveland Story Matters
Cleveland's transformation was never about changing the city. The city had already begun to change. What Cleveland did was close the gap between that reality and the story still being told about it elsewhere, a gap that had less to do with truth than with timing.
Civic confidence became the foundation. Collaboration became the mechanism. Reputation followed, later and more slowly than either, because reputation always does.
That is a more honest claim than most cities can make and a more useful one for other place leaders to sit with than a tidy framework would be. It leaves the reader with a question rather than a formula: how wide is the gap, in their own city, between what is actually true and what the world still believes.Follow Cleveland online
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