Is place branding a capitalist tool?

Abstract

Last March, a conference on Public Diplomacy was held at Wilton Park, the conference centre of the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Public diplomacy (PD) practitioners and academics from several different countries attended the event, and a lively discussion emerged around that future of PD. One strand of the debate that particularly interested the author centred on the connection between PD and the new, less well understood, but more and more frequently mentioned discipline of nation branding. Delegates sought to understand whether these were simply two versions of the same idea, one seen from an international relations perspective and the other from a more commercial angle, or whether they were in fact entirely different concepts; and if different, to what extent were they linked or compatible. The view the author expressed was that PD is in fact a subset of Nation Branding: he has always intended Nation Branding to consider how the nation as a whole presents and represents itself to other nations.