Place Branding for Endogenous Development. the Case Study of Tuscany and the Arnovalley Brand

Place branding tends to be introduced into the agenda of increasingly numerous public authorities as a tool for place management. Nations, regions, cities and inter-regional networks tend to relate their initiatives to brands in order to attract and retain resources e.g. capital and people. In light of the contemporary debate on regional and local development, this paper will analyse the potential of place branding to support endogenous development by legitimising emerging social groups and reinforcing their sense of place. That is, the project will contribute to filling in the literature gap related to internal branding aspects (Anholt, 2002) through the evaluation of the added value given by the interplay between all actors interacting with the brand. Accordingly, the main concern will be the understanding of the extent to which place branding may trigger three crucial issues emerging from the theoretical framework: social learning, institutional change and identity-building among communities. In so doing, the case study of Tuscany, Italy and Arnovalley, an attempt to brand the Tuscan milieu of innovation, will be carried out. Empirical evidence will prove that Arnovalley brand has produced spillovers concerning social learning, fairly weak communitybuilding and little room for institutional change. Avoiding claims of universal propositions, the research aims at finding likely explicative links that may orient brand management in practice and further academic debate. On all geographical scales, place branding tends to be introduced into the agenda of increasingly numerous public authorities. Indeed, socio-economic initiatives are often linked to brands for attracting and retaining resources e.g. people and capital. Accordingly, rising attention has been paid to branding, which is to be interpreted in light of public authorities’ entrepreneurial attitude going with the neo-liberal shift in public management (Gibson and Davidson, 2004). This ideological turn allows the interpretation of place branding as a “marketing-led strategy of economic development” (Greenberg, 2008:35), which implies that public authorities need to familiarize with competition, and accordingly with the translation of business principles and techniques into public tools. Consequently, marketing logics have been transferred from products to places, while the consequent “significant shift in meaning... [and] in complexity” (Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005:511) has been dealt more or less cautiously. Not little scepticism has been cast on place branding by simply stressing that places are not products and governments not entrepreneurs. The concern is that geographies are