Few researchers explore the intersection of place branding, marketing and emerging technologies as closely as Roberto Bruni. An Associate Professor of Business Management at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, he teaches marketing and management and has researched the impact of marketing and digital technologies on places and businesses.
Since 2015, Roberto has taught place marketing, with a particular interest in the social and economic dynamics of cities, collaboration among urban stakeholders, retail and commerce in city centres, and place identity. He has also worked with Italian municipalities on place marketing projects supporting the economic vitality of city centres. We caught up with him to discuss the role of shared purpose in place branding, how technology can create value without eroding identity, what Italian villages can teach larger cities, and why the future of place branding will depend on balancing innovation with tradition.
Roberto, what first sparked your interest in place branding, and what continues to inspire your research today?
My interest stems from a conviction: communities build their future when they share a purpose and a vision for their territory, even when the stakeholders within it pursue different individual goals.
Place branding takes shape in the strategic translation of this “communion of intent” and in the way it is narrated. Communities have always gathered around a symbol, a coat of arms or a banner, to express who they are and the place they occupy in the world, based on an identity built and handed down over time.
Place branding can support the narrative of past values, but it can equally articulate new projects and visions, allowing communities to decide how much to anchor themselves to their history and how much to open up to modernity and present-day conditions.
That is what continues to inspire me: a place can, at one and the same time, tell the story of its roots and explain who it wants to become, and for whom, together with the communities that inhabit it.
Your research explores the intersection of place branding and emerging technologies. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for technology to create real value for places?
Technology will play an ever-greater role in the future, increasingly connected to and integrated with people.
Value will be created when place managers and users both draw on advanced systems that interact with one another in simple ways. Place managers, for instance, will use technology to create and deliver content, gather and analyse data, and offer solutions that support the place value proposition.
Users, meanwhile, will engage with places through a range of complementary devices, from smartphones to smart glasses and other wearable or portable tools. They will adopt these technologies only if they prove practical, minimally intrusive, and able to deliver real-time answers tailored to the moment of the request and to the specific place where the user happens to be.
In your view, how can destinations embrace digital innovation without losing their identity and authenticity?
The years pass, yet in most destinations the challenges remain strikingly similar. At the heart of how territories evolve and develop there are always three elements: a shared vision and purpose for the development of the place; a willingness to involve stakeholders in continuous learning; and the intention to design and work by integrating the contributions of interested stakeholders.
Technology can support these processes and ease interaction among stakeholders, both internal and external.
But it is on those three pillars that the difference is made. They put a community in a position to decide which technologies to adopt, how to use them, and with what intensity.
Digital innovation, in other words, does not threaten identity when the community governs it and treats it as a useful tool.
Italy is known for its rich regional identities and cultural heritage. What lessons can other countries learn from the Italian approach to place branding?
Best practices are vast repositories of experience to draw on, but they are almost never replicable to the letter. Every place is different, and society constantly reshapes itself.
Italy is a beautiful and complex country, a mosaic of small and large realities. To my mind, it is still the “land of a thousand bell towers”, where history, the pride of communities large and small, values and traditions continue to generate a sense of place. This is precisely why place branding is not easy in Italy.
People are, for the most part, willing to use technology and respectful of progress. But when communities are called upon to change or transform themselves according to a development plan or a new approach to the city, such as new urban models, innovative mobility or digital experiments, they can sometimes stiffen and go into protective mode if they are not completely convinced and involved. In some cases, this slows the pace of renewal and innovation.
The Italian lesson emerges from comparing projects. Where projects stalled at the experimental stage, without the community fully grasping their value, the results were disappointing. Where, instead, there was perseverance with a medium- to long-term vision, anchored partly in local identity and partly in a clear vision of the future, and patiently explained to local communities, the actors of the territory came together around shared management models, advanced forms of public-private co-design, and a common culture of hospitality.
Place branding works when it moves beyond the status of experiment or exercise and, given the time it needs to mature, becomes heritage that is genuinely perceived and enjoyed.
Puglia Region represents an interesting case of place branding that has matured rapidly in Italy, managing to consolidate its brand awareness internationally. In recent years, the region has launched an integrated and durable communication strategy that positions the territory as an ecosystem of cultural and landscape attractions, strongly characterised by the human element and the hospitality of the local community.
An example can be found on the WeAreinPuglia YouTube channel, which features several videos showcasing Puglia’s tourism, people, opportunities, and lifestyle.
Beyond the offering of services and scenery, the true value proposition lies in the values, traditions, and authenticity that fuel daily life in the region. Promotional activities, initially focused on summer tourism, have expanded towards seasonal adjustment and, to some extent, the enhancement of the broader economic ecosystem.
In particular, although investment-oriented promotion remains less prevalent than tourism marketing, place brand management bodies highlight how tourism development is triggering a virtuous cycle, successfully generating growing interest from businesses and investors.
Place branding research has traditionally focused on cities. Why do you believe villages and rural places deserve greater attention, and what can they teach us about building strong place brands?
Small municipalities, villages and rural areas still have a great deal to teach us about the sense of community. When they decide to work towards a shared purpose, they manage to achieve it. Pride of belonging and attachment to tradition come to the fore, and it is often precisely from there that the capacity to experiment arises.
A cohesive community builds trust around shared projects and, where it can, is also willing to take risks.
Italy has no shortage of villages and inner areas that have tested advanced models of tourism, forms of community entertainment, shared assistance services, energy communities, and the collective management of public spaces.
Their strength lies in their speed and in their ability to picture the outcome of a project. They organise quickly and imagine the future together, rooting projects in shared values while boldly betting on what does not yet exist.
It is a lesson in method that applies to large cities too, although there, at times, the sheer size of the population reduces the effectiveness of such actions. Even so, in cities, there are virtuous examples in which individual neighbourhoods or well-defined areas commit to projects that lead to positive development.
You’ve collaborated closely with both researchers and practitioners throughout your career. How can these two communities learn more from each other to help places address today’s challenges?
The greatest limitation I have encountered is the difficulty of integrating two often very different approaches. Conversely, when researchers and practitioners meet on a common language and agree on which tools to adopt and to what extent, places benefit.
I believe one of the possible levers for fostering collaboration is mutuality. When the actors of a territory work and act with mutuality, they are willing to give up a little of their own advantage and their own way of doing things for the sake of the collective result and a medium- to long-term vision.
In this sense, it is the territory that gains, because it acquires substance and recognisability in the eyes of those who observe and experience it. In exchange for a benefit generated for the territory, the actors expected to create it are prepared to make sacrifices, or to relinquish part of their certainties and established ways of working.
Researchers and practitioners should not be deciding which of them leads the process. They should be building a shared, mutualistic working method together, imagining the territory as the sole beneficiary of their efforts.
If you could study one place anywhere in the world over the next five years, which place would it be, and why?
I would choose an African city.
I would like to deepen my understanding of the African continent and its cities because, for a number of reasons, I believe Africa may play an important role in the world’s economies in the years ahead.
It is a territory still largely unexplored from a place marketing and branding perspective, and the communities that inhabit it are undergoing rapid transformation. Its identity-related, social and economic dynamics seem to form an ideal laboratory for understanding how a place brand is born and built there, where the categories and models we currently study may well need to be rethought.
Interesting new insights and socioeconomic dynamics could emerge, useful for expanding the theory and practice of place marketing and place branding in other international contexts too.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for place branding over the next decade?
The main challenge, in my view, will be to maintain the balance between innovation and tradition.
By innovation, here, I mean identifying and systematising within places new socioeconomic elements that help build new identities, or that adapt older traditions and identity markers to new social contexts.
Societies change constantly, and with them so do cities and places in general. Traditions must be known, respected and handed down, but they cannot be the sole foundation on which a place’s identity is built.
Places change over time, and they need a form of place branding capable of capturing that change, anticipating trends and narrating places through a visionary lens that grows from deep roots.
AI and immersive experiences will offer powerful tools for analysing, managing and telling the story of places, but we must ensure that automation does not take precedence over human decision-making and human relationships, which remain the heart of every community.
The greatest opportunity, by contrast, is cultural, and therefore lies in education. By building communities’ knowledge and skills in place marketing and place branding, and, above all, by spreading the logic of value co-creation and the collaboration among territorial stakeholders needed to pursue the shared goal of improving residents’ quality of life, it will become easier to define a shared vision and the specific tools to govern change.
In the coming decade, those who succeed will be the ones who use technology as an enabler rather than a substitute, anchoring every transformation to the identity of places and to the participation of the people who live in them.
What advice would you give to young researchers and practitioners entering the field of place branding today?
My advice is to embrace these subjects without fear.
Studying the branding of places means understanding complex social dynamics that shed light on organisational and strategic issues relevant not only to cities, but also to businesses and to all the stakeholders of a place.
A researcher who explores the themes linking marketing to the study of places will, first and foremost, gain a broader and more complete grasp of marketing and management concepts, and will engage constantly with a multi-stakeholder approach.
On the side of translating research into practice, some difficulties may arise. Experience teaches that certain administrators struggle to believe in place marketing and branding. At times, they perceive these themes as remote from the traditional administration of cities or, in some cases, regard them as optional tools to invest in only when there is a budget surplus or a specific funding stream.
In some contexts, then, young researchers and practitioners still bear the burden of proving that their work is genuinely relevant, strategic and decisive.
Place branding, for instance, is a strategic model capable of giving a community the chance to define a positioning that would otherwise be hard to pin down.
I am convinced that, thanks to education and new technologies, the concept will spread ever more widely. It will become clear to everyone that every community needs to imagine, define and represent, simply and sharply, its own identity, its own marketing and branding strategy, and its own vision of the future.
It is a field that gives a great deal back to those with the patience to study, listen to, and imagine places.
Thank you, Roberto.
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