Places: Identity, Image and Reputation

Places depend on their reputations for almost everything in the modern world: tourism, foreign investment, the respect and interest of the international media, attracting talented immigrants and students, cultural exchanges, engaging peacefully and productively with the governments of other places. But what can actually be done to understand and measure the reputations of places, and even to influence them? Are they simply 'brand images' like the images of products, that can be influenced at will by the tricks and techniques of commercial marketing? Or are they, as Simon Anholt argues, deeply rooted cultural phenomena that move – if they move at all – very slowly, and only in response to major events and changes in the places themselves? This new collection of essays by the 'father of place branding', Simon Anholt, reveals compelling and essential new thinking on the nature of national reputation.