Aldermen and Mayors: think regionally, in your own interest!
A plea to switch from city marketing to regional marketing
In recent years, many Dutch cities have had the right idea and have invested heavily in city marketing as a strategy to attract and retain visitors, businesses and new residents, using their city’s own identity as the basis for their campaign. Now is the time to extend this strategy: many aldermen and city marketers act as though their city were an island, while marketing is really about listening to your customers more than anything else. And those customers, be they businesses or visitors, look well beyond municipal borders, basing their relocation decisions instead on the region or province. To them, ‘Amsterdam’ is not just a city but rather represents the entire metropolitan area from Schiphol Airport to Almere.
A good example is the new name for Rotterdam Airport: Rotterdam - The Hague Airport. These two cities can complement each other perfectly in terms of brand identity, and internationally the distinction will not make much of a difference. Rotterdam has been willing to give up its ‘own’ airport, realising that the association with The Hague will add value. Another example is the regional marketing plan that Amsterdam recently developed in conjunction with a large number of municipalities in the region. With these smaller, more rural and spacious communities complementing the capital's cultural and historical assets, both parties stand to benefit from a regional marketing strategy.
What can Berenschot do for you?
For one, we can help you define a coherent regional product. Working on a regional scale is becoming more common in the tourism industry, as seen in the promotion of the Veluwe region and the provinces of Friesland and Zeeland as tourist destinations. But regional marketing can be effective in other areas as well: not only in order to create comprehensive promotional campaigns, but also in terms of product development, by which we mean the region’s spatial, cultural and economic development. Berenschot can help you consider your region or sector from these perspectives. Take, for example, the development of business parks: how can cities in your area use the demand for space and the supply of activity to the community’s best advantage? And how do you take a regional approach to the development of public facilities such as theatres, multiplexes and swimming pools, thereby improving the competitive position of all parties involved? Our motto is: ’Outpacing the competition together, towards a joint marketing strategy’.
