Towards a contemporary research agenda for island branding: developments, challenges, and dynamics

This opinion paper aims at suggesting a research agenda for contemporary place branding by presenting developments, challenges and dynamics of the field based on meta-analysis of relevant literature. It is high time place branding is identified as a significant tool for exercising contemporary public administration. In order to achieve this scope, it is mandatory to advance the theoretical understanding of the field by building on existing knowledge and models like Hankinson’s and by incorporating cross-disciplinary knowledge from other relevant fields. Therefore, in this conceptual paper the authors attempt a critical review of the existing bibliography and professional reports in order to contribute to the creation of a regime of knowledge production, to group some key findings about selected gaps of the field and assess whether such analysis can reveal the need to identify new potential research paths. Building on existing cross-discipline theoretical foundations, adopting a conceptual approach, the authors aim at (a) urging readers—especially practitioners and scholars—to move beyond towards investigating more challenging and intriguing research gaps like the need to examine more alternative research units than cities like island and insular areas and (b) proposing to elaborate more on the relationships between concepts like tourism, sustainable development, place branding and islandness.