Smart cities and branding opportunities for location promotion

Clearly the flavour of the season is around the buzz about developing smart cities/intelligent cities. This represents a wonderful branding opportunity for cities to elevate location promotion to another level.  Needless to say, those who grab it quickly would benefit from this opportunity greatly. Since the time the Prime Minister of India announced his plans of developing 100 smart cities and allocating $ 1.2 billion for this programme, there has been a lot of buzz built around this. One can see a good amount of development happening in this direction which is good news.

There are numerous professional and contracting opportunities for those working in the areas of urban planning, IT, software development, sustainability development, green tech, clean tech etc. It’s a long road for India as far as development of a complete smart city is concerned in terms of the benchmarks established by say, European cities.

Smart cities development can be classified into two categories- a. creating an entirely new or a green field city and b. retrofitting an existing city with smart technologies required for the convenience of its citizens. While the former is a big exercise requiring mammoth efforts, the latter is an opportunity that many cities are capable of executing given their resources and constraints, relatively speaking. It also appears to be an organic approach to bring the dream of smart city to fruition. For the sake of this write up and where opportunities for city branding seem to be more wider, I shall focus on the latter.  

A good starting point can be identifying areas where development of the ‘smart city’ should be considered. Clearly, issues where needs  of the city are highest and need to be addressed on priority would be important. For example, monitoring and surveillance technologies to improve security of the city or intelligent traffic systems to regularise traffic flow are the need of the hour in most urban areas in India. All these developments could immediately be leveraged into a branding opportunity as this would catapult the city into a different trajectory altogether.

In terms of what happens to the inherent strengths of a particular city and whether they may fall in the background or stand diluted, a smart city tag, opens up avenues to combine both and in fact, takes the image of the location to another level. For example, when a temple city includes the word ‘smart’ in the branding of the city which could then turn it into a ‘smart temple city’, perception changes and takes the city image to another level.  For example, crowd management technologies or surveillance gadgets would create a sense of better security in the minds of believers. From the point of view of the outside world, a branding exercise like this creates a lot of new interest, curiosity and confidence in the city brand.

Advantages of seizing opportunities such as these impact many city stake holders. Firstly, this creates a completely fresh interest in a particular city which means existing marketing campaigns of city promotion that have reached a point of stagnation could get reinvigorated from the ‘smart/intelligent city’ tag. This has a direct impact for the real estate industry which is generally at the forefront of city promotion campaigns. Certain selling points such as a new industry coming in, road developments, a big retail chain setting foot have become cliché and stale. Many other cities are already talking about the same message maybe in different forms, so target customers have become immune to such messages.

City advocates have a good opportunity to speak about the city and the development around ‘smart city’ which people are also curious to know.  Almost all key drivers from a city point of view, depending on the developments being carried out stand to benefit. There could be ‘smart city’ developments around agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, religious and cultural places, weather and climate etc. which means that opportunities are aplenty. Also, most of these are ongoing which means a lot to talk about on an ongoing basis for location promotion. New technologies create interest and talking points. It would be a great idea to develop a common platform such as a website or a fan page that tracks, monitors and updates people about progress on these developments.

In terms of leveraging this opportunity, the key is to start taking steps in the direction of planning the development of a smart city on small projects. It could even begin with development of a neighbourhood and scaled up at the city level. Baby steps could also throw branding insights and in turn extend this on a larger canvas and take up a strong ‘position’. It is important for cities to get started quickly if one has to take advantage of the ‘smart city’ branding opportunity.