From strategic planning to city branding: some empirical evidence in Italy

The image of the city plays a crucial role to attract tourists and investors and to make citizens stay with satisfaction and avoiding them to move away. By exploring the connections and implications between theory and empirical outcomes of some Italian cities as to attractiveness (tourists and investors), this paper intends to offer a useful overview both for academics and operators. The purpose is not only to go through the extensive literature on strategic planning place marketing, city branding but to focus specifically upon some Italian cases (Turin, Genoa, Venice, Piacenza) where the application of the above mentioned instruments have given interesting results to compare