Who’s controlling your brand?
If you are not actively shaping your city’s story, others are doing it for you. Developers, residents, social media, and one-off experiences are filling in the gaps, often in ways that don’t reflect your city’s strengths or direction.
When that happens, momentum is lost. Opportunities hesitate. And economic potential goes unrealized. All because the story being told is unclear or inacurate.
Cities that treat branding as a strategic discipline create clarity and confidence. Cities that treat it as decoration remain interchangeable.
Economic development doesn’t start with incentives or brochures. It starts with a clear, believable story about why your city matters.
Mistake #1: Treating Branding as Promotion
Most cities jump straight to promotion. A new logo. A refreshed website. A slogan meant to “capture everything.”
That’s backwards.
Strong place branding starts with positioning, not promotion. Positioning answers hard questions:
• What kind of city are we really?
• Who are we trying to attract?
• What do we offer that competing cities do not?
If your brand tries to appeal to everyone, it differentiates you from no one. Economic development requires focus. Branding without focus is noise.
Reality Check
If your brand message could apply to five nearby cities with minimal edits, it is not a brand. It’s filler.
Mistake #2: Confusing Aspirations with Identity
There is nothing wrong with ambition. There is a problem with pretending.
Cities often brand themselves based on what they want to become rather than what they actually are. That creates a credibility gap investors and talent notice immediately.
Authenticity is not about staying small or limiting growth. It is about grounding your story in reality:
• Your existing industries
• Your workforce strengths
• Your physical environment
• Your culture and pace of life
According to place branding research, cities that lean into what is already true build trust faster and attract people who are aligned with their trajectory.
Reality Check
If your brand promise feels disconnected from the lived experience of residents or businesses, the market will ignore it.
Mistake #3: Assuming Branding Is a Communications Department Issue
Branding fails when it lives only in marketing.
A city’s brand is reinforced or undermined every day by the decisions leaders make and the experiences people have, whether those moments are intentional or not.
Your city’s brand is reinforced when:
- Economic development decisions consistently reflect stated priorities
- Downtown investments support the story the city is trying to tell
- Public-facing services feel aligned, responsive, and purposeful
Your city’s brand is undermined when:
- Decisions contradict the city’s stated focus or long-term goals
- Departments operate in silos with competing messages
- Everyday experiences create confusion or frustration instead of confidence
A clear brand gives city staff and partners a shared lens for decision-making. Without that lens, even well-intentioned efforts pull in different directions, and the message fragments.
Reality Check
If departments describe your city’s priorities differently, you don’t have a branding problem. You have an alignment problem.
Mistake #4: Ignoring Experience in Favor of Messaging
Cities love storytelling. But stories must be backed by experience.
• If you promote a city as business-friendly, is the permitting process easy?
• If you promote quality of life, do newcomers experience it quickly?
• If you promote innovation, can entrepreneurs see it in action?
Branding does not create reality. It amplifies it.
Strong brands invest in experience first, then talk about it.
Reality Check
Your brand is not what you say online. It is what people experience and repeat offline.
Mistake #5: Forgetting That Economic Development Comes First
Civic pride matters. But for city administrators, branding must earn its keep economically.
A strong place brand:
• Attracts aligned businesses and workforce
• Reduces friction in recruitment conversations
• Helps decision-makers quickly “get” your city
• Creates consistency across development efforts
Civic pride is a powerful secondary benefit. When residents see their city represented clearly and honestly, pride follows naturally.
Reality Check
If branding is not helping economic development conversations, it is not doing its job.
Fully Control Your Story
If you think branding is just the cosmetics like logos, taglines, and tourism slogans. You are costing your city valuable momentum.
Branding is an economic development tool. And most cities don’t struggle because they lack assets. They struggle because they haven’t clearly decided what story they are telling or why anyone should believe it.
City Brand Self-Test
Before launching another campaign or refresh, city leaders should pause and ask:
- Do we have a clear, shared understanding of who we are targeting economically?
- Can we articulate what makes our city distinct without using generic phrases?
- Does our internal decision-making reinforce the same story we tell externally?
- Are we investing in experiences that support our brand promise?
- Would residents recognize themselves in the brand we promote?
These are not marketing questions. They are leadership questions.
Download the City Brand Reality Worksheet
To help you put these ideas into practice, we’ve created a “City Brand Reality Check” worksheet designed specifically for city administrators and managers. It walks you through the key questions, alignment checks, and positioning decisions that matter most.
Use it internally. Use it with staff. Use it before you spend another dollar on promotion.
Filament Protip
All of our service area leaders has dozens of years of experience. These are protips they’ve picked up along the way that you can use right now to solve common issues.
