“I’m worried for consultants in general.”
That was Todd Babiak‘s first reaction when I asked him where consulting in place branding is heading. Todd should know. He spent years as a consultant before switching sides, and today, as CEO of Brand Gold Coast, he is the one hiring them.
His concern echoed something I had been noticing myself. This year, more than one consultancy that has worked with TPBO for a long time told me they would like to stay involved, just with less to spend for now. When the people who advise places start rethinking where their own money goes, or how much of it is left available for outreach and communications, something in the market is shifting.
So in September I asked about a dozen consultants and advisers, from London and the Gold Coast to Latin America and the United States, how their work is changing. Wheter this was about the omni-present AI, tighter budgets or stronger in-house teams, and what clients are still prepared to pay for.
Nine replied, most of them at length. I have kept as much of their answers as I could, because for me the detail is where it gets interesting.
What struck me first was how little of it was about AI. Most of it was indeed about melting budgets, and a few surprising observations inbetween, like, what happens once the consultants have left.
Less money, more players
Jeremie Feinblatt, until recently a principal at Resonance, where he led the global place branding practice, put it most bluntly when we spoke in early October:
I don’t think AI is the main disruptor in the place branding field right now. What I see is a stagnant market with an increasing amount of players in it. We’re not seeing more cities or regions investing in place branding than 10 years ago (I would actually argue there are fewer), but more consultants and agencies are interested in this field. With weak economic growth, agencies look for public-sector opportunities when they hadn’t needed to previously.
The main challenge I’m seeing is budget cuts. In Europe this is most important, where public-sector funding for DMOs and investment promotion agencies is being drastically reduced. In the US the situation is slightly different, as DMOs are funded through hotel tax and economic development organisations are mostly partnership-based, with members who prioritise lobbying over marketing.
Stu Speirs, director of Silver Lining Strategy in Melbourne, sees the same squeeze in Australia, and where the money goes instead:
I’ve gone where the work is this year, and here in Australia there just aren’t the budgets for place branding gigs as we’d ideally like to do them. Place making and activation get the funding, as the results are immediate and tangible. Sugar hit stuff, really.
In Latin America, says Leonardo Nieto Durán, an independent consultant based in Colombia who works with cities and regions across the continent, the problem starts earlier, with how place branding is understood in the first place:
One of the biggest challenges here is that place branding is still not fully understood within many public institutions. Significant resources go into tourism products, tourism plans and promotional campaigns, but there is often less willingness to invest in a shared territorial vision and a long-term city or regional brand strategy. The need for a coherent narrative is not always recognised, and decisions remain closely tied to political agendas and electoral cycles.
Three continents, and a similar picture: whatever is quick and visible gets funded, the long-term work less so.
Not everyone sees it that way. Konrad Jagodzinski, Place Branding Director at Brand Finance, describes a field that is growing up rather than shrinking:
The field is maturing, with more destinations recognising that a strong place brand requires more than marketing campaigns. There is a growing awareness of the importance of robust brand measurement and evidence-based strategy. The requirement to understand how perceptions influence a place’s ability to attract investment, trade, talent and visitors has become widespread.
A squeeze and a maturing field at the same time. Both can be true, depending on what kind of work you do and where, and for whom.
Smaller jobs, different clients
So what does the work look like when the big budgets are gone? Leonardo again:
I’m seeing consultancy move towards more focused assignments: a workshop on brand governance, investment promotion for a particular sector, or narratives for specific international markets. These assignments are happening, although with smaller budgets. The challenge is to ensure those smaller assignments still contribute to a coherent direction for the territory.
In the UK, Amy Lewis, director at CTConsults in Manchester, sees the jobs shrinking too, but for a different reason: the client has changed.
We’re seeing a shift in the type of clients that are procuring place strategy work, from predominantly local authorities to a mix of public and private sector bodies, such as business improvement districts, bondholder schemes and local visitor economy partnerships. This is often moving away from large, open procurement briefs to smaller, more localised tendering. A private sector lead can be more agile in its implementation, but it means procurers are not always getting the ‘best’ consultants applying, which will impact the quality of the work produced.
Two different markets, one shared worry: when the work is cut into smaller pieces, who makes sure the pieces still add up?
What AI takes, and what it doesn’t
AI, then. Ryan Short, co-founder of CivicBrand, keeps it short (and points out he made the same argument years before anyone had ChatGPT):
I think low-end execution work is certainly being replaced, but that’s not something that I see impacting true place branding. I actually wrote about that nearly 10 years ago, in 2017, way before any real AI was accessible, and still stand by all of that. AI certainly helps us make sense of thousands of open-ended qualitative data responses, and that is certainly valuable and frees up more budget for true strategy work.
Leonardo draws the line in a similar place: AI “can help with research and content production. But the value of external expertise remains in interpreting local realities, facilitating difficult conversations, building agreement and helping institutions make decisions they can sustain beyond a campaign or political term.”
Nobody, in other words, expects AI to replace the consultant. What it does replace is a good part of what clients used to pay consultants for, at least those concerned with such entry-level support offerings.
But AI is also changing something else: how places are perceived in the first place.
Natasha Norman of INSTID, the Institute for Identity, sees it already at work on the reputation side, though not yet on positioning itself:
In place brand identity and strategy, AI is being used for reputation management: it complements, if not altogether replaces, surveys of external audiences’ views. Nobody, to my knowledge, trusts AI with the actual positioning work yet. This is because capturing the place’s culture and identity requires serious qualitative input: observation, conversations, and critical analysis (rather than summing up interview responses). With this, places still need external expert help.
In future, AI could help analyse public discourses in social media to see what values and behavioural norms surface most, for example what people find beautiful or fair in a given place. This would feed into the positioning and identity analysis, which still needs to be done by a human.
A new AI expertise is also required on the marketing side: the channels and ways to feed AI the right information about places, so that it better reflects the genuine identity of the place.
Fernando Prado, managing partner of Reputation Lab, goes furthest:
In place reputation, I see a growing temptation to treat social listening, online sentiment analysis or AI-generated information as measures of reputation. I have always argued that there is no such thing as “online reputation”. There is simply reputation, which is ultimately about the feelings of admiration, respect and trust that a person, organisation or country inspires. If we want to measure those feelings, we need to ask the relevant stakeholders directly.
Interestingly, LLMs are increasingly being treated almost as stakeholders themselves. While they do not hold perceptions in the human sense, they are becoming powerful intermediaries in shaping public opinion. But we should not confuse what an AI system says about a country with what people actually think and feel about it.
Konrad sees two sides to it: how places are represented in AI tools, and what they contribute to the AI economy itself. Brand Finance is now asking about the impact of AI on place brand perceptions in its Global Soft Power Index 2027 survey.
The gap after the report
If one answer stayed with me, it was Todd’s. He co-founded the consultancy Story Engine and spent years advising places before crossing over to the other side, first at Brand Tasmania and now on the Gold Coast. A few weeks after his first reaction, he sent this:
When I started consulting, I quickly realized there was a gap between what I understood about managing a place brand and the reality of it.
My competitors at the time spent a lot of energy looking at external perception and then helping the city or state or country figure out a central or dominant idea and turn it into a strategy for those audiences. I did the opposite, trying to unearth the story of the place according to its citizens and helping them build everything inside-out before spending a dollar on external research.
We both got something wrong. We wrote the strategies and turned them into recommended plans and tactics, which is what consultants do.
Still, there was always a gap. My clients didn’t implement what I had hoped, even if the community demanded it. And I never truly understood why. Money? Political will? Staff turnover?
Six months into my first full-time job implementing a place brand, I understood why it is so hard. The “unifying” part of a unifying cultural expression and strategy doesn’t work unless a team is hustling to bring it to life. Which means bringing the consulting model, the client-service machine, inside the city, state or nation.
You have to earn trust and overcome the sceptics and listen to people, selflessly and patiently, until you understand. You have to hustle from the inside so that your government partners won’t just wait you out and do what humans do: make their own thing, without research or a unifying strategy, simply because it’s cool, or because New York or Tokyo did it, or because their friends in a consulting company or ad agency said it would be rad.
I still believe in consulting, of course, but it has to be deeply embedded and you need time. Most RFPs are written the wrong way, for an agency or consultancy to do some research and deliver a report or a campaign in six months and then go away. Then what? Who lives with it, and struggles every day to make it the foundation of everything?
The others, from the consulting side, arrive at much the same point. Amy Lewis:
A strategy is only as good as its implementation, and consultants have a responsibility to ensure that local partners and partnerships are equipped with the skills, knowledge and tools they need to do so. This is more than a toolkit on how to use the visual identity. Places need an active, longitudinal, hands-on mentoring and facilitation approach.
And on what consultancies now need to be good at:
Demonstrating impact and value for money, especially with the squeeze on local government and with local government reform underway. A long-term, strategic approach to place branding does not sit with political cycles, and politicians want to see more impact more quickly. So we need to be able to respond to that by being clear on quick wins, but not at the expense of long-term outcomes.
Konrad, too, sees what still stands in the way, and what that means for consultants:
Challenges remain, particularly in securing budgets and cross-government support needed to implement those strategies effectively. Hence a growing interest in measuring economic impact and in stakeholder engagement.
As the field matures, the challenge is not simply to develop a compelling strategy, but to ensure it is embedded across government, relevant institutions and the wider stakeholder ecosystem. Consultants will increasingly need to support places beyond the strategy development stage, helping them translate insights into sustained action and measurable impact.
Fernando, from the reputation side:
I believe the consulting model is evolving from delivering reports, rankings or branding strategies towards helping organisations translate insights into management decisions and measurable results. This is particularly relevant in place reputation, where no single institution controls a country’s reputation.
The strategy document, it seems, while surely relevant as a way to synthesize and offer direction, is losing its value as the end product. Everyone agrees that the work only starts there. Which leaves an awkward question for a business built on delivering it, and for the procurement rules Todd describes, which still ask for exactly that.
Inside or outside?
Todd’s answer is to bring the consulting model inside. Stu, writing from Australia a few days later, makes almost the opposite case:
Increasingly I think the case needs to be made for the importance of a truly independent set of eyes to observe a place in action. Ironically, for a practice that is best done “inside out”, it’s actually outsiders that are best placed to identify and articulate the “inside”, after having spoken to people and observed a place in action.
What that means for consultants is a need to be curious. To spend time in place, observe, live and feel the daily rhythms. Any idea that meaningful place branding work can be done remotely is misguided, for mine.
People that are people’s people, relatable and make people feel comfortable to open up, will become increasingly valuable.
I don’t think the two are as far apart as they first sound. Todd describes what happens when nobody stays to carry the strategy. Stu describes what is lost when nobody comes from outside to see it in the first place. Both are talking about time spent in a place, with its people, which is exactly what six-month briefs and shrinking budgets leave little room for.
Of course, nine answers don’t make a survey (and the client side, apart from Todd, is missing here). But I find it telling how quickly the conversation moved away from AI and towards an older question: who lives with the brand once the consultants have gone?
What I take from this
- Money matters more than machines, for now. Budgets for place branding are shrinking in Europe and Australia, while more consultancies and agencies compete for the work that remains. At the same time, demand for measurement and evidence-based strategy is growing, which should be good news for some of the more established players.
- The big strategy is no longer the default job. Assignments are getting smaller and more focused, and in the UK the clients themselves are changing, from councils to business districts and partnerships. Who keeps the pieces coherent is an open question.
- AI takes the desk research, not the judgement. Several respondents see it replacing preliminary analysis and low-end execution. It also changes how places are perceived, which means understanding how they show up in AI tools, without mistaking that for what people actually think.
- The value is moving to what happens after the report. Implementation, governance, measurement and showing impact came up in almost every answer. Procurement, as Todd puts it, often still asks for a report in six months.
- Time in a place is the scarce resource. Whether the consultant sits inside, as Todd argues, or comes from outside, as Stu does, both describe work that needs presence and patience, the very things short briefs and tight budgets squeeze out.
If you see it differently, from either side of the table, tell me – or share your thoughts as we discuss it all further on LinkedIn.
Editor’s Letter is where I share my own observations as publisher and editor of TPBO. This one draws on written contributions from consultants and advisers in our network, gathered in September and October 2026. Some answers have been shortened for length.
