The Importance of the Smart City Concept in Place Marketing

There is an extensive literature that describes the basic concepts, assumptions, tools and strategies used in territorial marketing (place marketing) in the US and the UK. The definition of place marketing in this paper is related to designing a place to satisfy the needs of its target markets, including residents, businesses, visitors (tourists) and investors. The designing is to help match what a place offers to the needs of potential target groups. Steady development, popularization and growing access to new technologies did result in the growing number of urban centers taking advantage of them in order to increase their effectiveness – also in the case of meeting the needs of residents. There is no doubt, cities are constantly changing and new technologies are one of the main factors that led to the emergence of so-called smart cities. There are several definitions of the smart city concept. However, most of them emphasize the ability to integrate multiple technological solutions in a secure fashion to manage the city’s assets. Moreover, new communication technologies foster local governance being the base for place marketing, especially so called internal integration dedicated to residents as a target group. The purpose of this paper is to present ways of responding to the needs of the residents with the use of modern information technologies by local authorities. The methods of desk research and case study used in the paper support the description of chosen processes in the smart city concept. Mitaka (Japan) and Stockholm (Sweden) have been used as good examples of the smart city concept.