Malcolm Allan place brand academy

Who is Who

Malcolm Allan

Place Brand Strategist, Educator, and Co-Founder of The Place Brand Academy. Malcolm Allan is one of the pioneers of place branding as a professional discipline. Trained as a town planner and urban designer, he has spent more than forty years working on how places are planned, developed, positioned and managed, in the public and private sector in the UK and across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East.

In 2002 he co-founded Placebrands with Simon Anholt, the first agency in Europe dedicated to place brand strategy. A decade later he founded the London consultancy Placematters, which merged with Bloom Consulting in 2018, where he went on to serve as President. His project record includes brand strategies for the Cork City Region, the City of Perth, Glasgow Airport, the Wild Atlantic Way and Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands, alongside nation brand work in Australia, Paraguay, Jamaica and Costa Rica.

Malcolm's consistent argument across that career has been that place branding is not a communications exercise laid over a place, but a development discipline: a way of deciding what a place offers, to whom, and how it will deliver on that offer over time.

The Place Brand Academy

Malcolm has put as much energy into building the profession as into practising it. With Dr Giannina Warren he worked with Middlesex University to develop the first Master's degree in place branding. The two went on to co-found The Place Brand Academy with Penny Bagnall-Smith: the world's first training academy dedicated solely to career development and capacity building in place branding.

The Academy's flagship course, Place Branding Essentials: A 10-Step Guide to Successful Implementation, is CPD-accredited and aimed at the people who inherit a strategy and have to make it real. It deals with funding, keeping stakeholders engaged, aligning activity with the brand promise, and tracking what actually works.

Malcolm is currently expanding the programme by inviting senior practitioners to develop courses in their own areas of expertise. The first is a masterclass by Caio Esteves on Future Place Foresight, which makes the case for brand-led placemaking that takes the potential future of a place into account. It has been recorded and will publish shortly. The second is a course by Stu Speirs, a leading voice in Australia, on the role major events play in defining the cultural identity of a place, expected within the coming month.

Current Thinking: Place Stewardship

Malcolm's present preoccupation is what he calls the elephant in the room for the profession: who actually takes responsibility for a place. Not just for its positioning and communications, but for ensuring it develops in ways that support its identity, reputation and long-term wellbeing.

The thinking emerged from a workshop on brand stewardship he presented at the Brand Finance Brand Forum in London's Guildhall in May 2026. His proposition is that a place brand should be treated as a shared asset, held by a community of stewards drawn from civic, development, community, cultural, environmental, experience and brand roles, rather than concentrated in one small team.

He distinguishes between strategic stewards, who protect the integrity of the brand over time, and operational stewards, who sit closer to delivery. His test for a good steward is a simple one: do they ask what they can do for the brand, or what the brand can do for them? Or, as he puts it, stewardship should be forethought rather than afterthought.

Malcolm Allan on Place Stewardship
Malcolm Allan giving a workshop at the Place Brand Forum in London, 2026.

Speaking & Advisory Topics

  • Place Stewardship – Who Takes Responsibility for the Place?
    Why place brands need stewards rather than only managers, what distinguishes a strategic steward from an operational one, and how shared responsibility changes brand governance.
  • Brand-Led Placemaking – Strategy Before Logo
    How planners, developers and architects can use place brand strategy as a development tool, and why the built environment professions have been slow to adopt.
  • Branding a City Region – Lessons from Cork
    What it takes to build a brand strategy across municipal boundaries, with stakeholder involvement and community legitimacy at the centre of the process.

  • Destination Brands That Last – The Wild Atlantic Way at Ten
    What happens in the decade after launch, when the value of a destination brand is either actively managed or quietly lost.
  • From Strategy to Delivery – Making the Brand Real
    Funding, stakeholder engagement, alignment and measurement: the implementation questions most place brand strategies leave unanswered.
  • Building Capability – Training the Next Generation
    The case for treating place branding as a profession with defined competencies, accredited training and a clear career path.

Contact Malcolm

Malcolm is a member of the Who's Who of Place Branding Impact Makers and the TPBO Hall of Fame. Read his 2015 interview and his case study on branding the Cork City Region.

Malcolm works with cities, regions, countries and developers on place brand strategy, stewardship and capability building, and speaks regularly at conferences and in-house sessions. Reach out via email or connect with him on LinkedIn.