Events and Places: What Strategies for Cities and Regions Marketing Choices? Remarks on Event Sector Development in the Post-Industrial City of Łódź (Poland)

Over the last decade the term “event marketing” has become both popular and ambiguous. It is used to describe small community initiatives gathering dozens of people as well as cyclic mass events with multimillion-dollar budgets. There is a variety of reasons why many people and organizations are using events as a marketing tool. For enterprises they are one of the instruments of corporate branding as well as ways of building relations with stakeholders. Public organizations perceive events as an instrument of building positive image among the public, as well as a way to convince people of certain social and political ideas. From the participants’ (users) point of view, events are more and more alternatives for spending free time or building a culture of participation in social life. Thus, a complex and multifaceted relation between an event and the place where it is held can be a very interesting subject to analyze. To what extent a given territory is a source of the event’s specificity? How much do organizing events (especially mega-events) and event marketing contribute positively to local economic development? What are the costs and benefits of organizing events not only for its organizers but also for the territory and the community involved? Is it more effective to organize huge mega-events or rather smaller projects prove to be more beneficial and efficient from the place-marketing point of view? These questions arise more and more often among local policy makers, MICE sector representatives, local activists, and so on. This chapter, by presenting the development potential of event hosting in the post-industrial city of Łódź, is an attempt to answer some of them in this particular local context.