Place marketing as an approach to planning place growth strategies - The case of Sydney Darling Harbour

• Main Author: Hoang, Thanh Van
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: VNU 2014
• Subjects: Place marketing; city planning; place competition
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/11126/4660
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

In the past three decades many cities and regions around the world have applied a marketing approach to place planning in an effort to attract development resources, now called “place marketing”. This paper offers a critical review of the evolution of place marketing, discusses reasons for the evolution and then investigates place marketing practices through the case of Sydney Darling Harbour. Although usedin much earlier times, place marketing was mainly promotional, intuitive and random then. A more integrated and strategic implementation of place marketing has been evident in recent decades. Place marketing is considered to be both a consequence of, as well as a necessity for, increased competition between places for development resources. Darling Harbour is the starting pointof a long-term and large-scale program of marketing the city of Sydney to its target markets - transnational corporations (TNCs) and tourists. Although the way in which it has been implemented is debatable, Darling Harbour is one of the most favoured attributes of the place product offered by Sydney to the target markets.