Place branding research: a thematic review and future research agenda

The growth of globalization has intensified the competition among countries, cities and regions to attract various target audiences. Places need different marketing and branding strategies to gain competitive advantage and reputation. This article presents a review of extant place branding literature and identifies various research themes. The 147 articles on place branding were identified from three major global databases published during January 2004 to April 2014 (the last 10 years) in scholarly or academic journals. These articles were examined, analyzed and categorized according to various criteria such as research themes, bibliographic data, method of study, method of data collection, types of data analysis techniques used, conceptual/theoretical frameworks proposed and geographical locations focused. Our results show that: (1) most of the articles are based on conceptual, case, and qualitative studies; (2) place brand identity emerged as a major research theme in all studies. The present article also provides avenues for future research by identifying major gaps in literature. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.