Towards a service-dominant place marketing logic

Abstract

A recurring theme in the place marketing literature relates to the inadequacies of traditional theory in accommodating the context specificity of places. Such special characteristics of place marketing relate to the complexity of place ‘products’, the complexity of the organizational mechanisms for their marketing, and the ways in which branding theory can be applied. This paper explores these three aspects through the ‘mindset’ of the service-dominant logic of marketing and its foundational premises. The paper concludes that, viewed through the lens of S-D logic, issues which have in the past been argued to create a degree of distinctiveness in place marketing theory and practice could actually have much resonance with more mainstream marketing. Thus, place marketing could be seen as being more similar to more ‘mainstream’ marketing practice than previous place marketing literature implies, and in some areas the specific place context may shed some light on issues relating to the service-dominant logic more generally.