Beyond the Fringe: Creativity and the City

One of the deep-rooted and long-established ideas of brand building is the need for control. The argument is that, for consumers and other stakeholders to have a clear understanding of a brand, there needs to be consistency of communication and action over time. This is the basis of using brand definitions — articulations of brand vision and values — to steer marketing campaigns and to construct well-policed visual identity programmes. The underlying premise is that brands should be fixed in time: ‘markets may change, but brands shouldn’t’ (Ries and Ries 1998). This ideal of brands emphasizes management, conformity and the containment of creative expression and rejects ambiguity, spontaneity and fluidity (Bauman 2001; Czarniawska 2003). We might question whether this view is credible and sustainable. The Ries and Ries perspective suggests that in some way brands are independent of markets rather than deeply integrated with and involved in the process of change, while an emphasis on control is increasingly undermined by the growing transparency of brands (Kitchin 2003) and the active involvement of stakeholders. Brands are no longer made by organizations. Rather they are constructed in a space in which organizations are influencers and listeners — something that Govers and Go (2009) recognize in the context of place branding in their 3-gap place-branding model.