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Role of regional
The role of regional administrations
administrations in improving
place branding effectiveness
An exploratory study
Pavel Yurievich Makarov and Alexandr Efimovich Illarionov Received 11 June 2019
Revised 9 October 2019
Department of Management, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy 19 January 2020
and Public Administration, Moscow, Russian Federation 26 February 2020
Accepted 5 March 2020

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study ways, which regional administrations affect place branding
effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach – The study was conducted based on qualitative analysis. In total, 10
place branding cases of federal subjects of Russia were considered to estimate short-, mid- and long-term
effects of place brands and quality of regional administrations’ place branding process management. The
information on these cases was taken and systematized from three groups of sources, namely, official
information from regional administrations (including regulatory acts); scientific publications focused on the
brands of selected regions; data from federal and regional news agencies.
Findings – It is revealed that the quality of place branding processes is positively related to the presence
and power of place branding effects, while the branding budget has no observable impact on place branding.
The areas of attention for regional administrations intending to develop the place brand are defined.
Research limitations/implications – The limitation of this study is that the chosen approach is based
on secondary data on brand-management practices that are publicly available. This information is mostly
fragmentary and may not provide a complete view of place branding practices.
Originality/value – This paper provides a view on place branding success factors from the standpoint of
the quality of branding process, rather than quality of the brand itself. The role of regional administrations in
this process is studied, thus proposing a basis for integrating place branding in a public administration field.
Keywords Place brand, Place branding effectiveness, Place branding process quality,
The federal subjects of Russia
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in territory marketing and
place branding at different levels of the territorial organization of economy (Braun et al.,
2014; Cleave and Arku, 2017; Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2008). A similar trend can be
observed in Russia, namely, at the country level (attempts to create a tourist brand of
Russia), its regions (more than 20 federal subjects’ brands), municipalities and local
territories (several dozen cities and territories’ brands). In fact, one of the regional
authorities’ roles became the role of region’s image maker in the external market and the
place brand becomes an instrument of public administration.

Journal of Place Management and

Development
The authors extend thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve and © Emerald Publishing Limited
1753-8335
clarify this manuscript. DOI 10.1108/JPMD-06-2019-0045
JPMD At the same time, an increase in numbers of branding initiatives is accompanied by
problems, both related to the excess of place brands (Cleave et al., 2017) and the poor level of
branding management: focus on developing the visual place brand component rather than
its grounding in an administrative system (Anholt, 2005) and using branding as a tool to
deflect public attention from other administrative activities (Eshuis and Edwards, 2013).
Often, these phenomena are related to the logic of regional authorities and are complicated
by the difficulties of monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of branding initiatives
(Ashworth and Kavaratzis, 2018). There are similar problems in the branding of places in
the Russian Federation (Makarov, 2017), namely, fragmentary and non-systemic initiatives;
lack of support for brands by residents and unobvious benefits from creating a brand.
The foregoing raises concerns for the future of place branding as a public administration
instrument: as a tool of a fast policy, it could become discredited and then declined. At the
same time, there is an increasing role of intangible resources (one of which is place brand) in
regional development. Places still have a need to be identified among others in a globalized
world and there is still a need for coordination of place advertising, marketing and
promotion efforts. So, the need for place branding will most likely not disappear.
Solutions for problems with place brand management are reflected in papers on
assessing the place branding effectiveness (Braun et al., 2014; Herezniak and Anders-
Morawska, 2015; Herezniak et al., 2018; Zenker and Martin, 2011). Also, an important place
branding aspect is analyzed in studies on the role of stakeholders in this process (Donner
and Fort, 2018; Martínez, 2016).
This study reflects the need to consider place branding from the point of stakeholder
analysis and concentrates on the role of regional administrations as one of the key
stakeholders whose actions have a significant impact on the result. Thus, this study is
devoted to the following question: how does brand management by regional administrations
affect place branding effectiveness?
This does not negate the role of other types of stakeholders (Martínez, 2016; Stubbs and
Warnaby, 2015), e.g. the residents of a region whose role was stressed in many studies
(Aronczyk, 2008; Braun et al., 2013; Martin and Capelli, 2017; Insch and Walters, 2018).
However, as part of the assumption stated above, the regional administration often makes
the first step – initiating the place branding process. So, whether or not proper primary
actions will turn out – this will affect subsequent decisions and stakeholders’ cooperation.
Thus, a place brand may be better or worse, but if a clear understanding of its purpose in a
particular region is not properly formulated or its use not appropriately planned, then it is
hard to expect an acceptable result.
Therefore, this paper contributes to the research of place branding management issues
(Boisen et al., 2018a; Noronha et al., 2017; Zavattaro et al., 2015), by studying the role of
regional administrations in this process.

Literature review and logic of research

Speaking of the whole concept of this study, the theme of public management within place
branding practices holds a noticeable place in a current research stream: according to
Vuignier (2017) more than half of the articles on place branding are classified in the public
management category, but the problem of the regional administrations’ impact on place
branding is not recognized as a common recurring theme (Vuignier, 2017). However, we
could observe this problem is addressed in different contexts, namely, critique of
administrations’ approaches – fast policy (Cleave et al., 2017); targets multiplicity (Ashworth
and Kavaratzis, 2018), etc.; study of the understanding of place branding among
professionals and its negative effect on practice (Noronha et al., 2017); and, the study of
effects of public managers involvement in the place marketing process (Eshuis et al., 2018). Role of regional
So, the findings of existing studies allow us to consider to what extent does common administrations
inappropriate brand management by regional administrations effects on place brand
effectiveness even if it depends on various stakeholders.
Proceeding to an empirical part we need to specify the studied parameters, especially the
concept of “place branding effectiveness,” as it seems quite broad within the context of this
study. This theme is quite noticeable in the literature and there are several reviews of
existing approaches (Cleave and Arku, 2015; Herezniak and Anders-Morawska, 2015).
For us, it seems there are two main directions within this topic. One direction deals with
branding effects and proposes effects evaluation by various models and indicator systems
characterizing the impact of branding (Herezniak and Anders-Morawska, 2015; Herezniak
et al., 2018; Zavattaro and Fay, 2019). Another direction is to study a value of place brand
itself and to concentrate on the brand equity valuation (Dinnie, 2008; Zenker, 2014; Zenker
and Martin, 2011; Zavattaro et al., 2015). Some authors (Cleave and Arku, 2015; Jankowska,
2012; Zhang and Zhao, 2009) also consider brand adaptability as a characteristic of its
success.
Within this research, it seems preferable to address branding effects rather than brand
itself because such an approach highlights the impact of governance on effectiveness more
precisely.
From a public administration point of view there is a holistic approach to place
branding effectiveness proposed in (Herezniak et al., 2018), and based on research on
the problems of efficiency in public administration (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2008; Lin
and Lee, 2011; Sun, 2009). Based on this, we could suppose that effectiveness of place
brand treated as a tool of public management should consider the evaluation of the
brand management quality, initial resources and effects with respect to the time of their
occurrence (Table I).
In terms of this logical framework, we could solve our research question by studying the
relationship of the “actions” (place branding processes quality) and the “output,” “outcome”
and “impact” (short-, mid- and long-term effects) as components of entire branding
effectiveness to see if the quality of place branding processes organized by regional
administrations is related to place branding effects. It should be noted that the quality of
place branding processes is less represented in publications than effectiveness, although
there are some studies concerned with problems of the place branding institutionalization
(Boisen et al., 2018a; Lugovaya, 2015), and the analysis of place branding practices (Noronha
et al., 2017; Zavattaro et al., 2015).
Proceeding from this point, we have determined the parameters to consider within this
paper:

Input Actions Output Outcome Impact

Budgets of individual Project Direct, Mid-term effects for Long-term effects Table I.
projects implementation immediate and the products’ for the Logic framework for
tangible action beneficiaries stakeholders of the creation of
effects given strategy effectiveness
Initial brand budget Place branding Brand effects
indicators in public
processes quality Short-term Mid-term Long-term sector adapted to
place branding
Source: Adapted and modified from (Herezniak et al., 2018) context
JPMD  The effects of place brands.
 The quality of place branding processes – thus, Figure 1 represent a logical scheme
of this study.

Speaking about an empirical base, we agree with (Boisen et al., 2018a) that there is indeed a
lack of comparative studies on place branding practices while it is quite a comparative topic.
So, as an empirical base, we will consider the practice of branding in the Russian regions,
which seems to be representative because there are diverse examples of successful, failed
and controversial brands. Although we suppose this research logic can apply to other cases
of place branding practice. Now, we need to define an approach for evaluating the
parameters.

Methodology and study sample

The logical scheme of the study leads us to the following research hypothesis: the place
brands with regional administrations performing higher branding processes quality have
higher positive effects.
To answer to research question we studied the relations between place branding effects
and place branding processes quality. These parameters were evaluated for 10 place brands
of Russian Federation regions. The evaluation is qualitative and based on secondary data
collected from regulatory documents and official information, scientific papers and websites
of Russian federal and local news agencies. Next, in this section we will describe our
approach in more detail.
Initially, we have to operationalize the concepts of branding effects and the quality of
place branding processes.
Taking into account the empirical basis of this study, the difficulty is that place branding
activities in the Russian regions are quite fragmentary and inconsistent, so they do not
provide usable data for measuring branding effects or processes quality directly based on
one of the existing approaches. Therefore, to measure the considered parameters within an
exploratory study, it seems appropriate to perform desk research and use qualitative
analysis of a secondary data – the information sources on place brands of the particular
regions. Such an approach has been used in other studies, e.g. it has been applied to the
study of the institutionalization of place branding (Boisen et al., 2018a; Lugovaya, 2015) and
is theoretically justified for evaluating the effects of place brands (Pashkus and Bulina,
2014).
Thus, we use qualitative analysis to form criteria to measure place brand effects and
categorize them. According to Table I, we decided to consider the effect with respect to time
perspective and to observe short-, mid- and long-term effects.
Accordingly the scheme presented in (Cleave and Arku, 2017, p. 431) shows there is the
next chain of effects, namely, place brand communication initially results in place brand

Evaluation of place
How do brand branding effects
management by regional Matching of obtained
administrations affect esteems, taking into account
place branding potentially significant factors
Evaluation of place
effectiveness?
branding processes
Figure 1. quality
The logical scheme of
this study
Source: Own elaboration
awareness and image, which then forms sense-of-place and finally leads to decision-making Role of regional
outcomes. administrations
Within the framework of our study we suppose that brand awareness and image could
be considered as short-term branding result. Then we could describe it in terms of brand
perception, i.e. how place brand was perceived by residents and other stakeholders after its
presentation.
Decision-making outcomes appear as the final result of place branding (Cleave and Arku,
2017; Eshuis and Edwards, 2013). Thus, the long-term effect could be estimated by finding
out whether place branding effects decision-making in a way intended by its developers.
Accordingly, we took an achievement of branding goals as the long-term effect measure.
We did not find the mid-term effect measures, which are both theoretically justified and
measurable on our empirical base. Thus, we chose to consider an actual use of the brand as
mid-term effects measure because if brand is not used after its presentation, then other
effects are hardly expectable.
Reasoning in this way, we result with the set of criteria, grouped in Table II.
Describing the criteria for assessing the quality of place branding processes the model
presented in Table I was taken as a basis, so we searched for criteria to evaluate this
parameter.
Ashworth and Kavaratzis (2010) state that place brand management “have very little to
do with promotion and communications.” Furthermore, brand development and promotion
activities tend to be delegated to third party institution, e.g. a branding agency, and
according to (Therkelsen et al., 2010) there are many actors involved in place branding
processes (local government, public service providers, private firms, local media, citizens,
etc.). In this regard, speaking about regional administrations, we considered the part of place
branding processes for which they could be responsible in the first place.
Thus specifying the concept of the quality of place branding processes within this study
we speak about activities of regional administrations during the place branding process. So
far, as particular place branding activities could differ in various cases we decided not to
judge in advance what particular activities are proper in the context of Russian regions.
However, despite the diversity of activities we could estimate how administrations are
carrying out place branding processes.
From this point we have defined two generalized processes in which regional
administrations take part. One is branding process preparation – here administrations often
take the leading part, namely, starting a place branding initiative, choosing place brand
developer, orchestrating the development activity, etc. Secondly, is part of regional

Parameter Criteria Rationale

Short-term effect Brand perception The most visible primary result of branding is its perception by
other stakeholders in the first months after its development and
presentation
Mid-term effect Actual use of the In some time after brand presentation, it is possible to see
brand whether the visual, communication and other components of the
brand are actually used
Long-term effect Achievement of In long-term perspective, it is reasonable to expect information on
declared goals the presence/absence of changes in the targeted aspects of a
region (investment, tourism, etc.) Table II.
Criteria to measure
Source: Own elaboration place brand effects
JPMD administrations in brand promotion activities, namely, what branding plans they have, are
these plans transparent, clear and, if so, whether they are thorough or superficial. In
addition, we consider the responsibility issues – which particular entity is responsible for
branding process or are there problems with task delegation?
Thus, we got three aspects of administrations involvement in place branding (Table III).
Criteria has now been set to estimate both concepts in this research. Naturally, these
criteria give only partial sight on situation, as there are many other measures for branding
effects and the quality of branding processes, are both broad concepts even if they were
narrowed to the regional administrations part. In this regard we will use the integrated
estimation of place branding effects and the quality of place branding processes to get the
big picture, but then go into details and study the differences in criteria to prevent a
misinterpretation of findings. Thus, our set of criteria is not holistic but allows to make a
fairly complete sight on place branding effects and the quality of processes.
As we use secondary data, we should give a description of the information sources.
Considering the multi-dimensionality of the branding effects, we identified three groups of
sources in the Russian-language information space.
First, regulatory documents and other official information related to the branding of
regions of the Russian federation. These are: the websites of the regional administrations,
the integrated databases of regulatory information (in particular, the reference systems
“consultant plus” and “digital fund of legal and technical standards documentation – docs.
cntd.ru”) and profiles of the regions potentially containing information about branding (for
example, the portal “investinrussia.com”).
Secondly, we consider publications by Russian researchers containing their expert
opinions on branding practice of particular regions. In past years, the problem of regional
branding was widely represented in both international (Vuignier, 2017) and Russian
scientific publications. At the same time, many Russian-language papers on regional
branding tend to be focused on situation analysis in a particular region that allows using
these publications as a source of information.
Thirdly, the largest group of sources are websites federal and local news agencies, which
may contain other information and expert opinions about the brand of a region. Initially, the
relevance of this group of sources was questionable due to its diversity but tests on some
regions have shown that information on place branding practices is clearly concentrated in
two main newsbreaks, namely, the announcement of branding process and place brand
presentation. Significantly less likely are news and opinions about the subsequent existence

Parameter Criteria Rationale

The quality of place Quality of branding The early stage of branding is often widely highlighted by
branding processes process preparation regional administrations – it is possible to quite definitely
assess the quality of the preliminary work on branding,
especially – work with place brand developer (were there any
violations, scandals or something else)
Quality of brand Availability and transparency of information about brand
promotion activities promotion plans. Thorough/superficiality of these plans
Responsibility for How the responsibility for brand management is secured:
Table III. brand management how it is distributed, what role branding plays in
Criteria for assessing development plans for the region, etc
the quality of place
branding processes Source: Own elaboration
of the brand. In this regard, this group was decided to use as a source of evaluation Role of regional
information on the early stages of branding in the region. administrations
The next step is to form a research sample. Initially, we collected data on sample regions
from the sources described above. The data cover a period from particular brand creation to
first half of 2019 when the data collection was conducted. We decided to concentrate on
cases of federal subjects of Russia (or simply “federal subjects” – common name for Russian
first-level administrative division units, includes republics, krais, oblasts, cities of federal
importance, an autonomous oblast and autonomous districts) because the brands of federal
subjects are usually more noticeable than brands of other administrative units and so
provide more available information (documents, opinions, estimates, etc.). For comparability
of the cases, we did not include the brands of cities or second-level division units even if it
was possible to collect data on them. To evaluate branding effects in a temporal perspective
we were interested in brands with history, we took brands that were created at least before
2016. Thus, we resulted with 10 federal subjects to consider (Table IV).
The brands represented are mainly focused on tourists, investors and local residents,
considered in publications as “common” place branding target groups (Anholt, 2007; Zenker
and Braun, 2015). As an unusual target-audience the federal government may be noted,
which was directly marked in this sense by the administrations of the Vologda and Omsk
oblasts and the Nenets Autonomous District.

Year Region Focus/target audience (TA) of the brand Budget

2010 Ulyanovsk oblast Increased investment attractiveness 3 million rubles

because of a clear positioning of competitive
advantages
2010 Omsk oblast Priority TA: population, investors, markets 12 million rubles
(interregional and international), federal
authorities and experts
2011 Kaluga oblast Investment, tourism and innovative 40 thousand euros
development
2011 Nenets Autonomous Investors (main TA), local residents, Not disclosed
District potential migrants, tourists, buyers of
exported products and officials of different
levels
2012/ Novosibirsk oblast Branding of the Novosibirsk region as a 50 million rubles
2015 modern and attractive business platform/
tourism brand
2014 Vologda oblast Socio-cultural sphere, tourism, promotion of Not disclosed
Vologda products, investment
attractiveness of the region and lobbying
for the interests of the region at different
levels
2014 Magadan oblast Building of a positive recognizable image of 100 thousand rubles
the area
2014 Kaliningrad oblast Tourism Not disclosed
2014- Altai krai The tourism potential of the region, in the 1.2 million rubles
2015 spotlight-rural tourism
2014 Republic of Tatarstan Tourist and investment attractiveness/ 42 million rubles
Table IV.
rethought as patriotism General
characteristics of the
Source: Own elaboration sample
JPMD The functional role of place branding in the federal subjects of Russia corresponds to the
brand view presented in publications as a tool for creating, maintaining or changing
opinions, intentions and behavior of subjects and consumers regarding the place, as well as
awareness of the capabilities of this place and the capabilities of stakeholders regarding it
(Pankrukhin, 2006). The place brand is treated as “a strategic lens and a decision-making
tool” (Allen, 2007), to help manage places in a way that allows consumer-place connections
and associations to form (Cleave and Arku, 2017).
In addition, it can be noted that, although branding becomes one of the tasks of a regional
administration that chooses this tool, the development and promotion of a place brand are
usually delegated to the developer: consulting companies (in most cases; during the 2011-
2018 in Russia was formed a market for place branding services, which has a number of
operating companies, e.g. Stas Marketing Partners, Nota media, Artemy Lebedev Studio,
Brandson Branding Agency, etc.) or unprofessional individuals (in the form of competitions
for residents).
Now, we have the sample and a method for the study, in the next section we will consider
the obtained results.

Research findings
When searching for information on place branding in Russian regions, it was taken into
account that regional administrations may have their own terminology to express this
activity (Boisen et al., 2018a; de San Eugenio Vela et al., 2013). Nevertheless, the analysis
showed that, in general, administrations tend to operate with the general concepts of
“regional brand,” “territory brand” and “marketing of territories” without making
significant differences between them, which broadly is in line with the current situation of
using these concepts (Boisen et al., 2018b).
Therefore, we end with a complete set of documents and papers relating to a particular
brand, the number of which varies depending on the brand (some brands attract more
attention of researchers and other experts or institutionalized in much legal acts). Next, we
categorized data according to Tables II and III. For convenience and clarity of subsequent
comparisons, qualitative information was transformed into scores as follows (Table V).
First, we systematized data on the effects of regional brands. In more detail, we will
consider the case of Altai Krai, which have all three types of scores. We found no negative
information on Altai brand perception – there were positive or neutral opinions presented, so
it gets one point for “brand perception.” Then, we can observe that this brand is not actually
used and communicated accordingly in recent years, the only use we found was a visual part
of brand on official touristic site, so we decided to treat this as a partial use and give 0.5
points for “actual use of the brand.” Finally, there was enough information on results – after
two years brand was marked as ineffective and declared goals was not achieved, thus it gets
0 points for “achievement of declared goals.” The total score of 0.5 was counted as a simple
average. In this way, we counted scores on other brands in a sample (Table VI).
We then assessed the quality of place branding processes in the same way (Table VII).
As detailed examples we can compare the best and worst results, e.g. Kaluga oblast and
Ulyanovsk oblast, which both have rather long-time experience of place branding.
In case of Kaluga oblast brand, we found that there were no problems at the initial stage
of the branding process – the developer was chosen without scandals, procedure violations
are not detected. Also, it is quite clear with responsibility – The Agency for Regional
Development of Kaluga Region is the institution responsible for achieving branding goals.
Promotion activities are transparent and seem to be adequate to investment orientation of
the brand. As a result, it gets one point for each criterion.
Effects Management quality
Role of regional
administrations
Brand perception 1 – positive feedback Quality of branding 1 – no problems detected
prevails process preparation
0.5 – conflicting 0.5 – the presence of single
opinions problems
0 – negative feedback 0 – multiple problems
prevails
Actual use of the 1 – brand is used Quality of brand 1 – data on brand promotion
brand promotion activities are available, plans are
constructive
0.5 – brand is used 0.5 – information is available,
partially plans are superficial
0 – brand is not used 0 – information is not
available
Achievement of 1 – reasons to Responsibility for 1 – clearly defined
declared goals consider the goals are brand management responsibility for the brand
achieved and its place in the
development plans
0.5 – controversial 0.5 – the presence of individual
information problems Table V.
0 – goals are not 0 – responsibility for the brand
achieved and its place in the
Scoring scale of place
development plans is unclear brand effects and the
quality of branding
Source: Own elaboration processes

Region Brand perception Actual use of the brand Achievement of declared goals Average

Magadan oblast 0 0 0 0
Omsk oblast 0 0 0 0
Novosibirsk oblast 0.5 0.5 0 0.33
Republic of Tatarstan 0.5 0.5 0 0.33
Ulyanovsk oblast 0.5 0 0.5 0.33
Altai krai 1 0.5 0 0.5
Nenets Autonomous
District 1 1 0 0.67 Table VI.
Kaluga oblast 0 1 1 0.67 Federal subjects’
Vologda oblast 1 1 1 1 brands effects (in
Kaliningrad oblast 1 1 1 1 ascending order)

The case of Ulyanovsk oblast brand gives us an opposite picture. In particular, there were
problems on the preparation stage: the first tender on brand development was cancelled due to
a scandal with choice criteria, so its development lasted for an additional year. When a brand
was finally created there was no transparent responsibility – it is not clear who is finally
responsible for branding within the regional administration. Thus, it gets 0 points for “quality
of branding process preparation” and “responsibility for brand management.” As about
“quality of brand promotion activities,” we found some activities in work with investors, but
the five-year program of branding declared by administration is not in open access or very
likely does not exist. So with this controversial data, it gets 0.5 point for this criterion.
JPMD Quality of branding Quality of brand Responsibility for
Region process preparation promotion activities brand management Average

Magadan oblast 0 0 0.5 0.17

Novosibirsk oblast 0 0 0,5 0.17
Omsk oblast 0 0.5 0 0.17
Ulyanovsk oblast 0 0.5 0 0.17
Republic of Tatarstan 0 0 1 0.33
Altai krai 1 0.5 0 0.5
Table VII. Kaliningrad oblast 0 1 1 0.67
Vologda oblast 0.5 1 0.5 0.67
The quality of place Nenets Autonomous District 1 1 0 0.67
branding processes Kaluga oblast 1 1 1 1
in federal subjects (in
ascending order) Source: Own elaboration

Matching of brands effects and the quality of branding processes (Figure 2) gives reason to
consider that the hypothesis expressed earlier is true, namely, the data shows that brands
with higher quality rates have, in general, better effects.
As we do not consider other possible factors, which have an impact on branding results,
this finding itself does not mean that any causality takes place. Nevertheless it gives reason
to propose it, and consider our results in more detail.
Regarding Figure 2 we can define a group of rather unsuccessful brands with total scores
under 0.5 – these are, namely, Novosibirsk, Ulyanovsk, Magadan and Omsk oblasts and
Republic of Tatarstan. In fact, they have very similar effect estimates (Table VI), namely,
negative or controversial brand perception, non- or partial usage of brand and no signs of
goals achievement (besides Ulyanovsk oblast on which there are some controversies in
opinions about goals). The low effects are accompanied by branding process issues
(Table VII). Thus, all of these brands have problems on the development stage, namely,
Magadan oblast – the competition among residents was cancelled due to unsatisfactory
project participation; Omsk oblast – there were signs of developer collusion; Ulyanovsk
oblast – the competition was held on the second attempt, the first one was cancelled; The
Republic of Tatarstan – the non-transparent choice of the developer; Novosibirsk oblast –

Effects Vologda oblast

1 Kaliningrad oblast

0.75 Nenets Autonomous

District Kaluga oblast

Altai krai
0.5 Novosibirsk oblast
Ulyanovsk oblast Republic of Tatarstan

0.25

Figure 2. Magadan oblast

Omsk oblast
Matching the quality 0
of branding processes 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1
The Quality of Branding Processes
and effects of federal
subjects’ brands
Source: Own elaboration
the information about the open competition is non-transparent. Most of these group have Role of regional
responsibility issues, besides Republic of Tatarstan, it was not clear, which department of administrations
administration or which entity is responsible for branding process management. Also, most
regions in this group have no branding plans available to the public or have superficial
plans, which give no understanding, as to what was proposed to be done with branding.
Thus, we see that even in detailed view low effects and problems with the quality of
branding processes go together for failed brands.
Back to Figure 2, we could consider brands of Vologda, Kaliningrad and Kaluga oblasts
as successful. In terms of our effect scale it means that they are the only brands in a sample,
which are recognized as achieving their long-term purposes and are actually used
(Table VI). In case of Kaluga oblast, these results were achieved even despite negative
perception of brand in a first year. Their quality of branding processes seems rather
controversial indeed (Table VII). The one common part is that all of them have transparent
and diverse activity plans of brand promotion. Also, about responsibility we could state the
most of these regions have a clear responsibility in appointment (besides Vologda oblast
where there is some uncertainty but at least branding policy is clearly expressed in plans of
a region’s development).
As to the preparation of branding process, there are different situations within this
group. Particularly there were no problems with the preparation stage in Kaluga oblast. In
Vologda oblast branding process was only partially transparent – there was much work
with stakeholders and residents but it is not clear who finally developed the brand concept
and promotion plans because of the brand positioning as “peoples’ brand.” In Kaliningrad
oblast branding process was quite problematic: one branding agency refused to work with
brand when their branding concept was criticized by the administration and other
companies provided their brand concept for free. Hence, for successful brands quality of
administration involvement in brand promotion and responsibility issues seem rather
important than preparation activities.
Finally, two brands seem controversial – brands of Altai krai and Nenets Autonomous
District. It is unlikely that they achieved their goals, in case of Altai krai – definitely not.
Despite that they are perceived in positive terms, and are actually in use, at least – partially.
In management aspect both have no problems in the preparation and development stage
and are supported by clear development plans. At the same time, both are unclear with
responsibility. The interesting issue here is with Altai krai: in contrast to other cases where
there was no information on responsibility at all, here we can show that three departments
were responsible. However, the distribution of this responsibility is unclear so we could
suppose that branding initiative came from some other part of an administration so these
three departments initially were not motivated to take this responsibility and tried to pass it
to each other.
We assume that there are three reasons for this controversy. First, it can be the result of
incomplete information if there was something not observable from open sources, which
could change the scores. Second, it is the result of some other factor affecting brand effects.
Third, so far, as we estimate quality of branding processes and place branding effects on
multi-criteria basis, there may be ineffective combinations of brand management practices.
To summarize these results we could conclude that long-term branding success is
usually accompanied by thorough elaboration of brand promotion plans. There is also
something between entire branding effects and preparation of branding process: although
not all successful brands were without problems in the preparation stage, all failed brands
had similar issues. The same situation is with responsibility – in all cases of success it was
clear, but not with unsuccessful brands. Although there is still a need for more precise
JPMD estimation and study, we suppose that there is some relation between regional
administration efforts on branding and its effects.
At the end of this section, we will match some other variables with studied parameters.
According to the scheme described earlier in Table I, the initial budget of a branding
project (“input” in the theoretical model) should be considered as part of an effectiveness
measure, so we considered how branding effects correlate with the budget. From the data
obtained it follows that the success of branding has no clear connection with its budget
(Figure 3). With a budget up to 12 m roubles there is a negative relation and none with a
budget over 42 million roubles. At the same time, there were no brands in the sample with
budgets between the named values, and the budgets of three successful brands (Kaliningrad
and Vologda oblast, Nenets Autonomous District) are not represented in the public access.
The next variable of our interest was the level of place branding institutionalization,
treated as a reflection of branding in the legal field, as it is considered in a considerable
number of Russian science publications (Lugovaya, 2015), as a proxy for the quality of place
branding processes measurement. However, our results show that the level of
institutionalization does not relate to place brand effects or the quality of branding
processes. In particular, from Figure 4 it is clearly seen that most of the regions in a sample
are attributed to the highest level of institutionalization. At the same time, these regions
differ in scores of the effects and the quality of branding processes.

Effects
1

0.75 Kaluga oblast

Altai krai
0.5
Ulyanovsk oblast Republic of Tatarstan Novosibirsk oblast

0.25

Magadan oblast Omsk oblast

Figure 3. 0
Matching the budget 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
Budget, mil. roubles
and effects of federal
subjects’ brands
Source: Own elaboration

Vologda oblast
1
Magadan oblast 0.75 Kaliningrad oblast
0.5
0.25 Institutionalization
Altai krai 0 Kaluga oblast Processes quality
Figure 4.
Matching the quality Effects

of branding processes
and place branding Omsk oblast Ulyanovsk oblast
effects scores with
Novosibirsk oblast
rankings by level of
institutionalization
Source: Own elaboration based on data from (Lugovaya, 2015)
Finally, an interesting pattern was found by a geographical comparison of selected brands Role of regional
(Figure 5); if the region is located closer to the east, then the brands turned out to be less administrations
successful. This pattern, presumably, may be because of the proximity of the region to
Moscow and, accordingly, a large choice of consulting companies for brand developing but
could be a subject of a separate study within this research field.
Thus, we have considered a link between place branding success and quality of brand
management by regional administrations. Despite the results, we expect that the quality of
branding processes is not the only factors of branding effectiveness; however, a more
detailed study of the success factors of regional branding goes beyond this paper.
In the next section, we will consider discussion and practical implications of the results
that were obtained.

Discussion
The findings of this study conclude that the brands that are managed at a higher quality
level have more significant positive effect. In general, it seems logical that proper
governance will lead to better results; moreover that vision underlies the effectiveness
measurement within a public administration context (Herezniak et al., 2018). Nevertheless,
the pattern of data scatter is not strictly linear and shows that regional administrations were
not the only part in place branding success.
As we have concentrated so far on the role of regional administrations in the branding
process, we feel that there could be an influence of other stakeholders beyond the scope of
the study. Stakeholder involvement became an important part of place branding and is
treated in the following different ways: “the need to be as inclusive as possible in the number
and type of stakeholders” (Ashworth and Kavaratzis, 2018) and the legitimizing of place
brand in the eyes of major stakeholders (Herezniak et al., 2018). Considering our data and
findings from that point of view we observe controversial information. Thus, we have the
cases supporting the idea that public managers should re-evaluate their role in the place
branding process and establish a dialogue on it (Kavaratzis, 2012): in cases of Omsk oblast
and the Republic of Tatarstan, a mix of negative brand perception by residents, experts and
media and an intention of administrations to solely carry out branding process was one of
the significant reasons why these brands failed. On the other side we have quite an effective
brand of Kaluga oblast, which faced the same negative perception and lack of dialogue
within the branding process but overcame it; the possible explanation here is that all

Vologda region Effects

1
Kaliningrad region 0.9 Nenets
0.8 Autonomous
Kaluga region District
0.7
0.6 Altai region
0.5 Novosibirsk
Ulyanovsk Republic of
region Tatarstan 0.4 region
0.3 Figure 5.
0.2 Brand effects
Magadan
0.1 Omsk region region
assessments ordered
0 by geographical
West East
location of the region
(from West to East)
Source: Own elaboration
JPMD criticism was about the visual part of brand, while it became a common part that place
brand is not just “a logo” or a “visual identity” (Boisen et al., 2018a, 2018b).
Within this context the focus on the role of a regional administration possibly needs more
explanations. The initial idea, that place branding is often initialized by public managers and
only then becomes the matter of stakeholder interaction, may not fit for all place branding
contexts, but definitely fits the situation observed in the studied federal subjects of Russia. The
administration of the region acts as an initiator of the branding process and participates in all
essential processes, namely, it forms a request, chooses a developer, coordinates the activities of
stakeholders in the process of developing and promoting a brand and determines further use of
the brand, etc. That leads to a more significant role of public managers.
Considering this situation in light of findings that higher involvement of public
managers in the place marketing process leads to clearer brand concept and higher effects of
place marketing on spatial planning policy (Eshuis et al., 2018), leads our study to similar
conclusions. In our study this statement is supported by the fact that more successful
brands were supported by various activities that ensure their integration in a regional
governance system and contributes to more clarity of the brand concept. Among these,
activities are, namely, the expression of support from regional leaders, work with target
audiences and the creation of an institutional environment corresponding to the brand, etc.
On the contrary, regions with less successful brands had only a formal mention of the brand
and, apparently, either do not carry out the relevant work or non-systemically embedded it
into the operational activities of separate departments.
Summarizing the observations, we can articulate the following description of the typical
practice of federal subjects’ branding, namely, the developer of a place brand implements a
branding project and transfers the result to the regional administration, which somehow
uses it. At the same time, the administrations often use the brand as a tool for superficial,
fast policy (Cleave et al., 2017) and do not consider the benefits of long-term oriented
branding. As a result, we can see the departments avoiding responsibility, branding
activities reduced to a logo creation, even the loss of property rights on place brand (e.g.
during the Omsk oblast’s brand development at a certain point after its presentation the
ownership of its visual part was lost).
Therefore, from our point of view, within the place branding process the task of a higher
order is to modify the regional administrative system in such a way as to ensure effective use
of a brand as a tool of policy making i.e. brand integration into the administrative system.
Within the directions of future place branding in public administration outlined in
(Ashworth and Kavaratzis, 2018) we could suppose that the need to understand branding as
communication and the need in stakeholders involvement are complemented by the need to
pay attention on how place branding deals with other regional policy tools and incorporated
in a decision-making process.
Proceeding from this idea we can derive practical implications, which will be described in
next section.

Practical implications
Considering the practical implications of this research finding, we can point to the following
areas that require the attention of regional administrations, which intend to proceed with
place branding projects.

Choosing the developer

As most place brands are formed with external participation in their development (with
varying degrees of participation, namely, from developing the visual component to full
brand development and plans for its integration), then the future of the brand very much Role of regional
depends on the choice of a developer. As the analysis in the previous section revealed, administrations
almost all of the unsuccessful brands had problems at the stage of choosing a developer, so
there is a need for attention at the preparation stage of the branding process, namely,
criterion setting, and defining of rules and contracts.
To further explore this area we can conclude, that it is preferable to delegate the creation
of the visual and marketing part to a professional rather that residents or employees of some
administration. Some regions are trying to create a brand by competition among the
residents (Magadan and Novosibirsk oblasts), but it did not succeed. So, the choice of one
company on a competitive basis is proven to be a more efficient practice. However, this does
not completely deny the possibility of residents’ involvement in brand creation, but clearly
means that there is a need in a more sophisticated procedure than a simple open competition.
A branding in Vologda oblast could possibly be the case – although their brand concept
seems to be quite professional despite the position of “people’s brand,” there was a set of
initiatives on residents’ involvement, e.g. public discussions.

Brand integration
Here we mean an activity of brand embedding into a regional administration system, which
may include the development and implementation of a branding program, determining
responsibility for brand development, taking special activities aimed at the needs of the
brand’s target audiences, etc. Our findings show that successful brands were supported by
transparent and elaborated plans, while administrations of regions with failed brands very
likely had no plans at all. Also, there were issues with responsibility (which seems for us as a
part of brand integration) within unsuccessful brands, so it is important to fix the
responsibility for use of the place brand and/or ensure interdepartmental cooperation.
It is important that integration issues could be partially delegated to a developer, the
responsibility for its implementation lies with the regional administration as the main entity
of brand management in the region (in case of administration-driven place branding
initiative). It would also seem appropriate to have a brand promotion program that
correlates with other documents of regional development, but does not allow for the scope-
creep of the branding project and the uncontrolled dispersal of brand-related activities
across departmental programs and strategies.

Budget
Although the budget was not recognized as a crucial factor, it still matters. In our sample,
we have a case of Magadan oblast, which the administration set a competition budget of 100
thousand roubles, which is more than 10 times less than the next “cheapest” brand from the
sample (1.3 million roubles). As a result they got unsatisfactory projects to participate in,
and cancelled the competition so the brand was not finally developed.
We could provide one more case to this single example of a low-budget competition. The
Vladimir oblast was not included in the sample due to the absence of a place brand, but the
idea of brand development was announced by the regional administration in 2015 and
framed as “an interesting topic by itself, that may not need financial incentives,” then there
was an attempt to run the competition among the residents in 2018 within which it was
announced that “the winners will be awarded with diplomas and valuable prizes.” Similar to
the previous example, the brand with an extremely low budget was not developed.
JPMD Brand creation
Place branding models are mostly well-developed and well-presented in literature (Hanna
and Rowley, 2011; Zavattaro, 2014) so they were less reflected in this study, but brand
creation is still an important component of the branding process, including the definition of
the essence, advantages, attributes, social role, target audiences of the brand and its
relationship with other brands and visions of further development. Therefore, regional
administrations still need to pay attention to it.
Based on findings of this study, we could propose the following consequences of
implication of our recommendations. By working on choosing the developer and brand
integration processes policymakers could gain a better understanding of branding
processes, purposes and ways to use place brand. It could result in more thorough
branding activities and better comprehension of how brand creation process should be
managed and what results may be expected. Also, reasonable budgeting could prevent
branding projects from being depleted by low budgets or becoming a struggle for
overstated budgets.
This all leads to improved incorporations of place brand in regional management
systems, and therefore, could increase chances to achieve branding goals, thus other
stakeholders (companies, residents, etc.) could also benefit from it, depending on what
kind of brand it is.
These expectations, however, assume that public managers intend to do strategic-
oriented branding of policy instead of a fast-policy approach. Although it can be a theme of a
separate study, we suppose that fast-policy branding does not always work. It could take
some attention and decoy residents or other stakeholders from actual problems. However,
when it is once discredited by spending resources on some unobvious result, it is hardly
possible to develop new place brand to solve new or short-term local problems. As an
example, we have a case of Ulyanovsk oblast: at the beginning of 2018 the governor declared
a new place brand project, but this initiative soon faded away apparently due to lack of
prospects. Thus, fast-policy branding itself seems to be a disposable governance tool.
Within this regard our findings show that regional administrations should rethink of
place branding processes in a more strategic and long-term oriented way, which will result
in improved and better effects, while fast-policy place branding leads to simple resource-
spending.

Study limitations and the directions of further research

The main limitation of this study is that the chosen approach of evaluation of the brand
effects and the quality of branding processes is based on secondary information about brand
management practices. This information is mostly fragmentary and does not provide a
complete picture of the structure of place brand management systems. Because of this, there
may be data that contradicts the estimates and conclusions made.
However, this limitation is offset by the fact that the analysis is based on the study of
observable place brand effects and fundamental governance issues. Consequently, the
obtained estimates are sufficient to obtain reliable descriptions of relevant management
systems regardless of the details and can be considered as “reducing uncertainty”
(Hubbard, 2014) about the studied parameters.
The limitation occurs due to poor coverage of public administration issues in place
branding within the Russian context. Therefore this study is exploratory in nature, it also
presumes that further development of research is needed in this field. In particular, we can
suggest some future direction in study development:
  increasing of sample: horizontal (data collection on more federal subject brands) and Role of regional
vertical (data collection on cities and second-level units of administrative division); administrations
 identification of other factors affecting place branding effects – very likely among
them are: social unrest in the region; level of trust to the authorities; conformity of
the brand orientation to the specificity of the region; economic situation in the
region;
 enhancement of research methodology: defining of indicators and primary data
collection; and
 broaden the scope of the study by including various stakeholders in consideration.

Conclusion
Research conducted empirically shows that policy-makers seeking for new tools of regional
development should pay more attention to its proper employment. As there is no obvious
way of “proper” place branding, this study also suggests a comparative case study as an
approach to recognition of best practices in the field.
The results of the study show that for now, there is still a gap between the complexity of
place branding and the way this concept actually is used in the practice of public
administration. This gap leads to ineffectiveness and probably even dis-creditation of place
branding as a tool of regional development.
The empirical part of research revealed that performance of regional administrations in
certain branding processes goes together with better branding effects and results in
achievement of branding goals. Therefore, one of the promising ways to increase place
branding effectiveness lies with an improvement in brand-management by regional
administrations.

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Corresponding author
Pavel Yurievich Makarov can be contacted at: makarovpu@ya.ru

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