Exploring Place Branding: State of the Art and Future Research Directions

During these last years, place branding has gained in popularity among local officials, institutional stakeholders, academic authors, and researchers since it has become a relevant topic at the heart of places’ issues of development, promotion, and attractiveness. Several disciplines have contributed separately to the development of place branding highlighting various concepts and different variables; however, the emergence recently of a convergence has led to a more comprehensive view of the subject and to expand its research platform by unveiling new issues. The interest of this paper is to put the place branding in its context, go back to its origins in order to understand its evolution, define it, and explain its conceptual development to come out at the end with future research tracks.