INTRODUCTION

The reputation of nations, regions and cities is a key facet of place branding. Van Ham (2001: 3), for example, has argued that reputation is fast becoming ‘a key aspect of a state's strategic equity’. Likewise, Anholt (2005: 119) suggests that place branding is ‘more an attempt to manage the reputational assets of the place than sell it in the global marketplace’. The need for strategic management of often fragile reputations has been further exposed by the high media profile of international disasters, health scares and terror attacks. Incidents such as Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th 2001 and in London on 7th July, 2005, as well as a series of health scares linked to human and animal influenza pandemics (from SARS to ‘foot and mouth’) have serious implications for maintaining a secure reputation in the nations, regions and/or cities concerned (Papadopoulos, 2004; Hall, 2004; Glaesser, 2006; Mansfield and Pizam, 2006).

In articulating the importance of a secure reputation in place branding, we can draw partially on the earlier work of Holcomb (1993), who isolated the development of a ‘reputable’ image as the primary goal of the place marketer, whose aim was to ‘construct a new image of the place to replace either vague or negative images previously held by current or potential residents, investors and visitors’ (p. 133). Clearly such ‘revisioning’ by branders aims to correct negative place images through strategic image management, as Avraham (2004) has argued:

‘…today as cities attempt to acquire a favorable image amongst investors, immigrants and tourists, the leaders of many cities believe that the unfavorable images and stereotypes associated with their names are obstacles that forsell a brighter future’ (p. 471).

Moreover, such (re)branding is often required as a result of negative publicity often linked to criminality or mismanagement in large post-industrial cities, and necessitates erasing ‘negative’ traits through image improvement or rearticulating the issue at hand as a positive feature (Gertner and Kotler, 2004: 54).

This paper is particularly concerned with the urban scale, and how a city's reputation might be altered in the light of new international security challenges — an area that according to Van Ham (2004) remains, to date, largely outside of the place brander's field of vision. In this paper, we focus upon how urban managers and marketers have reacted to a terrorist attack when it has occurred and how, through a very specific type of branding, they have sought to promote the affected cities to tourists, convention and event organisers, and inward investors. This, we will argue, is often done through branding the city in question as both increasingly ‘secure’ but also as ‘prepared’ to respond to such a terror attack (or another disaster incident) and able to return to a ‘business as usual’ scenario at speed — in other words the city is characterised by what might be termed urban resilience, which is embedded within physical infrastructure and governance systems (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008). Within this context, the paper advances the notion of ‘reputational risk’ to argue that security and resilience are now, in certain contexts, becoming key aspects of ‘selling’ a city.

When discussing the ‘selling’ of cities it is, however, important to draw a distinction between key terms that are often seen as interchangeable — ‘place marketing’ and ‘place branding’. This is a subtle but important distinction. As we will highlight in the latter parts of this paper, the progression from place marketing to place branding is mirrored by how security is increasingly utilised in place selling.

In the broader management literature, place marketing can be seen as a sub-set of marketing. Place marketing refers to the various communications techniques used to ‘sell’ places and their attractions or products through identity and image construction.Footnote 1 As a concept, place marketing achieved great prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a host of consultancy and academic studies began to highlight how such techniques might be utilised by urban managers and their partners to gain a competitive advantage as economic restructuring began to remodel the post-industrial city, often through property-led regeneration schemes (see, eg, Kearns and Philo, 1993).Footnote 2 Such ‘product’ enhancement and subsequent marketing has undoubtedly been facilitated by more entrepreneurial modes of governance, which developed in the post-industrial city and which privileged polices for developing public–private partnerships, physical redevelopment, cultural planning, and importantly advertising and promotion through specialist agencies (Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Ward, 2000).

Place branding by contrast is a far more sustained and sophisticated effort at selling the city and is based on the more advanced ideas of brand marketing.Footnote 3 Place branding emerged in the early 2000s as a distinct academic discipline and is viewed as a way in which nations and cities might control their reputation given the increased competition and pressures of the global economy. Here it is increasingly common to conceptualise a city as a ‘distinct’ brand in order to differentiate it from its competitionFootnote 4 (see, eg, Warnaby and Bennison, 2006). Place branding, in this sense, is about the long-term management of the reputation and identity of a place — creating what might be termed ‘brand loyalty’. The need for such distinctiveness draws from a critique of traditional place marketing where comparable marketing strategies were employed in similar places and often involved the inauthentic manipulation of the culture and history of an area in order to attract inward investment or tourists (Gold and Ward, 1994; Holcomb, 1994).

Whereas place marketing helps develop a city image, this is the ‘starting point’ for place branding, which tries to unite ‘a wide range of images intended for the city and meaning attributed to the city in one marketing message, the city brand’ (Kavaratzis, 2004: 63).Footnote 5 Although it has been argued that place branding has focused largely upon attracting tourism (see, eg, Ekinci and Hosany, 2006; Blain et al., 2005), more difficult challenges are beginning to be confronted (including, as we will argue in this paper, security planning). In short, place branding has ‘now expanded beyond the narrow boundaries of an applied marketing field’ (Morgan, 2006: 12) to become an area where governance, economic development and long-term sustainable planning coincide. It is also, as Anholt (2005: 19) identifies, ‘…primarily about people, purpose and reputation, not about money’ (emphasis added).

Within the context of the emergence of place branding as a distinctive field of academic enquiry, and the increasing use that seems to be made of safety and security in such an endeavour, the remainder of this paper is divided into three main parts. First, we will unpack the idea of ‘reputational risk’ to highlight how aspects of security are increasingly branded and utilised by increasingly entrepreneurial governance regimes to promote particular locales as safe, secure and importantly resilient. Resilience here is defined as ‘the ability to detect, prevent and if necessary handle disruptive challenges … This includes but is not limited to challenges arising from the possibility of a terrorist attack’.Footnote 6

Secondly, we will illuminate the consideration of ‘reputational risk’, by utilising both historical and contemporary examples of place branding from UK cities that have suffered a sustained risk of terrorist attack. Examples here are drawn from empirical work conducted by the authors in Belfast, London and Manchester,Footnote 7 which highlight how security has been actively marketed in some instances, while being hidden in others, in order to retain multinational business clients or enhance event-driven tourism (see, eg, Bradley et al., 2002). It will also demonstrate how concerns with reacting to a terrorist attack, or defending areas from attack, have over time been replaced in the place branding effort by a message that a city is ‘prepared’ and can bounce back from a terrorist incident immediately. In short, it poses the question: how can a city develop a reputation for ‘resilience’ — that is being able to swiftly return to a state of ‘business as usual’ after an attack?

Thirdly, we will conclude the paper by making a case that increasingly security and resilience have a key role to play in helping to develop the place brand and in developing a ‘safe’ reputation for cities. In this sense, we argue that security thus becomes another tool in the armoury of place management and branding at the local (and national) levels, and emerges as a factor in the attraction of inward investment and conference-led tourism.

THE IMPORTANCE OF REPUTATION MANAGEMENT AND RESILIENCY FOR PLACE BRANDING

In the private sector, much has been written over the last 20 years about the importance of organisational image and reputation in developing appropriate corporate strategy and contributing to the success of firms competing in the marketplace (Weigelt and Camerer, 1988; Fombrun and Stanley, 1990; Fombrun, 1996. Corporate reputation has increasingly been seen as a strategic asset (Smythe et al., 1992). In this sense, a corporation's reputation can be defined as ‘a cognitive representation of a company's actions and results that crystallises the firms' ability to deliver valued outcomes to its stakeholders’ (Fombrun et al., 2000: 87). Reputation is important, as a reputation once formed often becomes embedded and is hard to shift — whether in the case of product brands, companies or, in the case of this paper, particular locations.

The risk to reputation therefore requires careful management through an array of promotional activities such as public relations exercises and targeted marketing, or branding. Rayner (2003) highlights that this will inevitably involve risk identification, prioritisation and developing appropriate responses, in order to build a robust and integrated risk management system that can forge a sustainable reputation. In short, the management of ‘reputational risk’ is now seen as a key element of good quality corporate governance (Larkin, 2001; Zaman, 2003), which should be able to identify and proactively plan for events that might impact either positively or negatively on the organisation's reputation and brand. In this sense, managing reputation ‘is not just about keeping one's head below the parapet, or avoiding media attention. It is also about the upsides: identifying and exploiting opportunities for reputation enhancement, performance improvement and competitive advantage that will add real value to the bottom line’ (Rayner, 2003: 15).

Building resiliency

The idea of reputational risk, in more recent times, has begun to be associated with the need to embed risk management and crisis management into organisation culture in order to build corporate preparedness. Here importance is placed upon risk assessment through ‘horizon scanning’ and the detection of, and response to, emergent threats and disaster events in a way that assures stakeholders or investors that all is ‘under control’ and that the company has the ability to ‘bounce back’ from such disruptions. For example, Sheffi (2005) in ‘The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage’ explores how the response to disruptions that occur in private sector business functioning is focusing not only on security that might be deployed but also on ‘corporate resilience’ and how it is possible that investments made to embed such resilience might in turn be beneficial in terms of competitive advantage. Others have also highlighted how resilient attributes of a location are also a key to reputation in a neo-liberal economy. For example, the resilience to the vulnerability of energy supply can impact upon the attractiveness of cities and regions as places to locate industry. As Greenburg et al. (2007) note:

‘If …the system fails to respond quickly, and business perceive that the region is riskier for them than it was before the event, then any location where such system failures occur can be seen as becoming a less desirable place in which to conduct business and live’ (p. 732).

These emergent private sector management principles of reputation management, reputational risk and corporate resilience have, under the guise of new public management, been increasingly integrated into the way in which the public sector operates. In the UK public sector, and especially at the city level, there has been a renewed focus upon developing greater organisational ‘resilience’ to ‘civil contingencies’ in response to crises, not least the ongoing threat of terrorist attack.Footnote 8 Traditional ways in which local city government managed such risk had been through systems of emergency planning or disaster management. After the events of September 11th, these traditional systems have subsequently been updated to reflect a far greater focus upon issues of resiliency and preparedness. This new system of so-called ‘resilient planning’ is seen as more proactive, better integrated within core government goals, better resourced and subject to performance management assessment by national government. Importantly from the perspective of the key arguments in this paper, local government, in conjunction with marketing agencies, have also seen such resiliency as an opportunity to brand places as ‘safe’ and ‘prepared’. Table 1 highlights this shift from risk management and emergency planning to resilient planning in terms of key attributes.

Table 1 From risk management to resilient planning
Full size table

The broader place marketing and place branding literature is also increasingly beginning to focus upon how strategies might be developed to counter unfavourable images associated with such crisis events, and how to market places perceived to be in crisis. In the tourism sector, a number of commentators (Glaesser, 2006; Mansfield and Pizam, 2006) have attempted to categorise such ‘crises’ as follows:

  1. 1

    crime-related events such as robbery, rape, murder or kidnapping;

  2. 2

    terror-related events such as bombing of public places or plane hijackings;

  3. 3

    political unrest events such as violent demonstrations, uprisings or riots;

  4. 4

    natural disaster events such as earthquakes, forest fires, extreme heat/cold waves, hurricanes or tsunami;

  5. 5

    epidemic-related events such as SARS, AIDS or foot and mouth disease (cited in Avraham and Ketter, 2008: 80–81).

Others have attempted to highlight strategies by which place managers can deal with negative images. Avraham (2004), for example, has noted a number of techniques local authorities might employ. These include the following: encouraging visits to the city and nullifying stereotypes; hosting spotlight events; turning a negative characteristic into a positive one; changing the city's name, logo or slogan; solving the problems that led to the formation of the negative image; and delivering counter-stereotypical messages. The following sections will highlight how some of these techniques for negative image alteration have been used by place branders to counter the perception among inward investors that certain places are at greater risk from terror attack or from the disruption caused by unpredictable circumstances and events.

REPUTATIONS AT RISK: EXAMPLES FROM THE UK

In this section of the paper, we will illuminate how ideas of reputational risk have been used in place branding in response to the occurrence and threat of terrorism and the associated fears of business relocation and a reduction in tourist numbers. We will exemplify this through examples drawn from three UK cities, which highlight different aspects of attempts to place brand through security and resilience. First, and from a historical perspective, Belfast in Northern Ireland will be used to show how first high levels of security and then ‘name changing’ occurred in an attempt to re-image and re-brand this ‘pariah’ city. Secondly, we use the example of London, which since the early to mid-1990s has highlighted active security and focused upon resilience and preparedness to successfully turn the city into a brand, with the purpose of stopping the relocation of international financial business and attracting inward investment and tourism. Thirdly, we draw upon recent examples from Manchester, in north-west England, whose leaders have attempted to combine a focus upon convention tourism with the necessity for high levels of security and resilience, and in so doing construct a brand loyalty based on their ability to deliver large-scale events in a safe and secure fashion.

The cloaking of security risk

As Western cities suffered the effects of a declining manufacturing base, place-marketing strategies became increasingly important to attract new investment. These often involved attempts to create a new image for cities often linked to significant physical regeneration and renewal efforts. For example, Neill et al., 1995 in their book ‘Reimaging the Pariah City’ (Neild, 1995, p. xi) indicated how in bomb-ravaged Belfast and industrially declining Detroit significant attempts were made to re-image cities that had been negatively stigmatised. For example, in relation to Belfast, Northern Ireland, Jarman (1993) argued that the place image of Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s was inexorably linked to terrorism: ‘the view from outside, largely mediated by television and newspaper photographers, is presented mostly as bomb-damaged buildings, endless parades and colourful paramilitary murals, and ignores their context within the more extensive transformations of the urban environment’ (p. 109).

It was in the 1970s and 1980s that central Belfast became known across the globe for acts of terrorism. The city centre in particular became a besieged citadel, which initially led to fears that security measures would destroy the city centre in a way terrorists never could — by keeping customers out (Brown, 1985b). The response of the urban authorities was to set up a security zone locally known as the ‘ring of steel’. In this zone the city centre was encircled with a series of tall steel gates and armed checkpoints for pedestrian entry. This led to significant problems for the viability and vitality of the city core, which became a place many shoppers and investors choose to avoid (Brown, 1985a).

As the relative threat of terrorism against Belfast city centre decreased during the 1980s and 1990s, urban planners and marketing agencies began an attempt to re-image Belfast in an attempt to attract businesses back and stimulate further inward investment (Neill, 1992). Reduced levels of security, decreases in the number of terrorist attacks, redevelopment and pedestrianisation, and place-marketing attempts subsequently helped to repatronise central Belfast (Coaffee, 2003). Neill (1992) provided the following phasing of such marketing and branding ideas:

  • — First, the defensive policy of the 1970s, which encompassed a radical defensive landscape to deter terrorist attack.

  • — Secondly, the encouragement of tentative development between 1980 and 1984, which saw a partial repatronisation of retail activity to the city centre.

  • — Thirdly, active promotion and planning from 1985 to 1992, which saw a concerted effort by the local authority to improve the physical infrastructure of the area as well as promote the area to business organisations worldwide.

The re-imaging of Belfast was, however, seen as only partially successful — being seen as superficial and not as a catalyst to tackling the real problems of the city. Gold (1994: 23), for example, referred to this type of advertising used in Belfast as the apotheosis of the traditional place marketing campaign to the point where the name Belfast was removed from advertisements and was frequently replaced by ‘Laganside’Footnote 9 (or the name of another strategic development area in the city) in an attempt to shake off its image of terrorist violence associated with the Belfast brand (Coaffee, 2003). In this situation, security risks were obviously bad for reputation and therefore new regeneration areas avoided references to the ‘stigmatised’ city name wherever possible. Equally, in the associated marketing slogan ‘And you think we have problems?’ there was a clear attempt to diffuse the negative image by ‘delivering counter-stereotypical messages’ by highlighting the cheap price of renting property and the high educational attainment in Belfast compared to elsewhere (Avraham, 2004: 477). Belfast in this period highlights a clear example of attempts by branders to strategically manage a city's image to increase its attractiveness to inward investors by removing negative references to terrorist-related insecurity.

Selling safety and security to inward investors

Like Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s, many cities during the 1990s began to be affected by acts of terrorism that impacted their reputation as a ‘safe’ commercial area. In the early 1990s, important financial centres became prime targets of terrorist attack because of their vast array of new ‘designer’ office buildings, their increasingly cosmopolitan business communities, and the significant media attention and publicity that could be obtained by the terrorists.Footnote 10

In a UK context, the main terrorist threat during the early to mid-1990s came from the Provisional Irish Republican Army, with their prime target being the City of London (also known as the ‘Square Mile’) due to its iconic value as the traditional heart of British imperialism and its economic importance at the centre of the British and global financial system. Large-scale bombs were detonated in the City of London in 1992 and 1993. In addition, in the early to mid-1990s, two further bombings in 1993 and 1996 targeted the London Docklands — London's secondary financial centre and seen by many as a symbolic extension of the City of London. In London, as a result of terrorist threat a range of protective security measures were introduced, including physical barriers to restrict access and advanced surveillance techniques in the form of security cameras (Coaffee, 2003).

The City of London's security cordon or ‘ring of steel’, implemented in 1993, represented a more symbolic and technologically advanced approach to security, which tried to avoid the ‘fortress mentality’ of Belfast in favour of less overt security measures that would be more acceptable to the international business community. The security cordon, however, provided a highly visible demonstration that the City was taking the terrorist threat seriously in order to reassure financial industries that they were doing all they could to stop terrorism and avoid business relocation. Indeed, while the security cordon was promoted to potential inward investors as a positive attribute, and one no other global city had, within London, the ‘ring of steel’ was promoted to the wider London population in terms of traffic management and environmental improvements that attempted to remove any references to the ongoing terrorist threat — it was officially called ‘the Traffic and Environment Zone’ (Coaffee, 2003).

The London Docklands, containing the iconic Canary Wharf complex, was also the focus for counter-terrorist planning through the 1990s. After the 1996 bomb in the southern part of the Docklands, the business community successfully lobbied the metropolitan police to set up an anti-terrorist security cordon to cover the whole of the Docklands — the so-called iron collar — modelled on the City of London's approach, amid fears that high-profile businesses might be tempted to relocate away from the area. The most noticeable difference between the scheme initiated in the Docklands and that in the City was the overt advertising of the Docklands security cordon — with messages such as ‘security cordon — stop if directed’ — on large signs at entry points into the cordon instead of downplaying the zone's anti-terrorism purpose (Coaffee, 2004).

Prior to the events of September 11th, counter-terrorism measures in the UK focused almost exclusively on London's financial zones, with these zones becoming synonymous with increasing the ‘quality of life’. Here heightened levels of security were a key selling point in attempting to brand the affected economic districts — London's financial zones — to potential investors and tenants. For example, the London Chamber of Commerce's ‘Invest in London’ publications highlighted the City of London's cordon as a key contributor to enhanced safety in London, leading to an increase in ‘business confidence’ (London Chamber of Commerce, 1994/1996). Equally, when the ‘iron collar’ was constructed on the Docklands, it was referred to as a ‘ring of confidence’, which gave those inside the security zone a feeling of safety and prevented the feared exodus of high-profile tenants (Coaffee, 2004).

Branding the resilient reputation

Post-September 11th, metaphors of ‘resilience’ have been increasingly used to describe how cities and nations attempt to ‘bounce back’ from disaster, and to the embedding of security and contingency features into systems of urban governance. The events of September 11th led to an instant counter-response from London authorities in order to reassure global businesses that they should not relocate from London through fear of further attack (Coaffee, 2004). Although the place branding literature highlights that a ‘business as usual’ approach is commonly deployed to cope with a crisis of image, it is commonly seen as one that places prefer to ‘downplay’ (Avraham and Ketter, 2008: 138). In London, by contrast, since 2002 such an approach began to be marketed positively as part of the ‘London Prepared’ brand. In this case, a moment of crisis became re-badged, in part, as a moment of opportunity.

September 11th made traditional counter-terrorist tactics appear inadequate, and security policy began to shift to proactive and pre-emptive risk management strategies that focused more upon preparing for, and recovery from, terrorist attacks. In 2001/2002 a specialist emergency planning partnership — the London Resilience Forum — was established to address the strategic emergency planning needs of London as a whole (not just the financial zones), which were seen as well developed for dealing with conventional emergencies but required re-evaluating in the light of the September 11th attacks. In broad terms, the London response, post-September 11th, was based on restricting the opportunities for terrorists to strike and in preparing the capital for the inevitable attack (which came in July 2005).

One of the key roles for the London Resilience Forum was to help retain a competitive business edge for London. This is most notably achieved through the development of strategic emergency plans for London and the encouragement of Business Continuity Planning. This later task involved liaison with individual businesses and business associations to promote the updating and regular testing of contingency and security plans that would help facilitate a return to ‘business as usual’ as soon as possible after an incident. Importantly, the emergency plans developed by the London Resilience Forum were utilised after the multiple coordinated attacks on the London Underground on 7th July, 2005 and appeared to work well, although the experience of an actual attack highlighted several areas for further development to improve the overall resiliency of the management of a complete integrated management of the ‘disaster cycle’.Footnote 11 The success of the response and recovery planning after the 7/7 explosions were summed up by the limited economic impact as a result of the bombings. After an initial fall, the overall FTSE 100 index was only 1 per cent down on the previous day. This deficit was fully recovered on 8th July.

Since the early 1990s, the UK, and in particular London, has sought to develop a robust and proportionate approach to counter terrorism. Today, the response to terrorist risk usually poses the question — ‘Are we prepared?’ rather than ‘Can we prevent it?’ (Coaffee, 2006). In this context, there has been a paradigm shift from protective counter-terrorism towards preparedness and resilience, which is quickly becoming a key factor in shaping how global cities and their business environments are structured. London has undoubtedly been successful in developing a brand reputation for itself in terms of resilience to terrorism. A recent report by the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2005), for example, highlighted the remarkably quick return (hours not days) to ‘business as usual’ after the attacks of 7th July.

London's long history and reputation for effective counter-terrorism is now being branded as ‘London Prepared’ (see www.londonprepared.gov.uk) and used to further promote the city and its business centres on the global stage. Such promotion now plays on the importance of the safety of resilience of the city as part of ‘the sell’ to external investors. A recent statement by London First — a lobby group, campaigning for inward investment to maintain London international brand — summed up the commitment of the London business community to work in partnership with the police to enhance preparedness:

‘London First aims to make the UK capital the best city in the world to do business. That includes improving our security and our resilience. We aim to help our members and London businesses generally to improve London's preparations for and protection against terrorist attack’ (cited in Think London, 2005).Footnote 12

As opposed to an image of security in 1990s central London of ‘checkpoints and cameras’, what has emerged in London since September 11th is a well-integrated, properly resourced and proactive style of emergency ‘resilient’ planning, which is being increasingly utilised by marketing agencies to promote and enhance the ‘London Prepared’ brand to international investors and to retain confidence in London as an integral part of the global economy.

Branding and resilient events management

In the cases of Belfast and London, advanced but appropriate levels of security and emergency preparedness/resilience were key selling points in attempting to market the affected economic districts to potential investors and tenants. This technique is now being increasingly adopted by other UK cities in relation to branding themselves as safe and secure for meetings tourism. This can be exemplified through the examples of security planning in Manchester, UK, over the past decade.

Manchester has already been shown to be a post-industrial city on the move with creative branding of the ‘industrial-modern’ city, capitalising on its global heritage as ‘cottonopolis’ (Peck and Ward, 2002), and its pop-cultural reputation (Haslam, 2000). In more recent years, it has built upon this through the successful regeneration that followed large-scale terrorist attack in 1996Footnote 13 (Carlson and Taylor, 2003). Here, Manchester has sought to develop a strategic approach to place branding, which emphasises not only the renaissance underway but also that the city is ‘prepared’ for further terrorist attack or other disruptive events such as large-scale flooding. The proliferation of this reputation for successful safety and security has also been implicitly embedded through the smooth management of international events such as the Commonwealth Games in 2002 and, in more recent years, of high-profile and high-risk, national political events and conferences.

In both the above-mentioned events, large-scale militarised ‘island’ security operations were rolled out at tremendous cost, involving the cooperation of both civil and military security agencies in preparation for the events over a period of months. The Commonwealth Games in particular was marketed widely as ‘the friendly games’, and as such the preparations were discrete, yet robust, and rolled out well in advance through a rational set of practices and with little pomp or public ceremony. Significant work was conducted, including an extensive search of the city where ‘every inch of the city, from its sewers to its waterways, streets, alleys and public buildings, [was] being scoured for any sign of weapons, explosives or any other potential threat’.Footnote 14 During the Commonwealth Games, over 1,000 police patrolled the city and event venues. The lessons from ‘securing’ this event were fed back into the evolving resilient planning structures of local and regional governments, creating a reputation for ‘positive’ security planning, a reputation that was mobilised again during preparations for the large-scale political party conferences subsequently held in the city (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008).

During these political conferences held in 2004 and 2006, large expanses of the central city were placed in ‘security lockdown’. This involved the construction of temporary rings of steel to vet mail, personnel and vehicles entering the secure cordon, 24-h aerial surveillance during the event, and a large and visible armed police presence. This was also supported by a sustained media campaign in the local press relating to the benefits to the city following some negative backlash from local citizens over the shutdown of transit routes during busy shopping weekends. Media campaigns focused on the massive boost to the local and regional economy brought into the area by such events, a fact noted and seized upon by marketing agencies, implicitly fostering a concept of the city as vibrant and safe and ‘the place to go’ for conferences. It was estimated that the 2006 conference brought an extra 17,000 visitors to the city and boosted the local economy by an initial £15m, with the potential of a regional gain of £100m per year. This could represent a 30 per cent increase in business tourism if high-profile conferencing becomes a regular part of the urban scene (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008). The aim is reputational enhancement through implicit concept management, not explicitly mentioning risk, but rather fostering an awareness of organisational resilience and security competence underpinning the national, or global, profile for investment and ‘meetings tourism’ in the development of a brand loyalty (Bradley et al., 2002).

CONCLUSIONS — SECURITY AND RESILIENCE AS SELLING POINTS

It barely needs stating that any high-profile disaster is bad for business. Place branding through security and resilience is increasingly becoming part of a new regenerative landscape of cities, but is managed in a series of contrasting ways across a range of institutional and location-driven contexts.

Although these are increasingly international concerns, we have focused in this paper on examples from the UK. At the national level, this security and reputation context is often framed as a discussion of ensuring the smooth operation of the ‘UK plc’. Indeed, UK Security Service guidance (2006) to business now emphasises the need for ‘resilience’ to and to ‘be prepared’ for a terrorist attack. Here three key reasons are listed: legal obligations, the need to ensure business continuity and loss of reputation (p. 3, emphasis added). This emphasis on security and resilience also connects a range of scales from the national level through to regions cities and specific events, trickling down to infrastructural adjustments that affect everyday management of urban security for all citizens. In this context, a number of key themes emerge for the place brander:

Marketing the city through seamless provisions and tight ‘everyday’ security — ‘It's safe here’

Urban managers are now overtly linking security to regeneration. This occurs in many cities, in terms of the everyday management of new ‘cultural or conference quarters’, the public realm and spaces of commerce, as well as broader strategies of place branding that play on the importance of the ‘safety’ of cities as places of business and as part of ‘the sell’ to tourists, external investors and event organisers.

Branding the city through exposure to events — ‘We can handle it’

The implicit resilience associated with a place that has experienced disaster events and has subsequently returned to a state of normality — either very quickly or, in the case of massive-scale disaster events, over a period of time. Such evidence of resilience can come to underpin the reputation of a location, particularly a city, in the global marketplace of urban centres competing for recognition and inward investment.

Marketing the city through tight emergency preparedness — ‘We are prepared’

Security can be used as an explicit tool in the marketing of ‘preparedness’, thus feeding stature and reputation of a location as a major metropolitan centre by the perceived need for security and the embedded practice of resilience in the infrastructure, the governance and the services within an urban area or region. In this sense, the branding of security strategies and institutions themselves as elements of an entrepreneurial governance system can be seen as utilisation of security as a vital selling point in their global city ‘offer’ (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006: 508).

The development of a secure reputation is now a vital strategic place-based asset that requires careful management and marketing. Reputational risk management is now seen as a key element of good quality corporate governance that might impact either positively or negatively on the city's reputation.

What is now slowly emerging is not just the creation of a more integrated, better resourced and proactive style of emergency planning, but the increased use of security and resilience being used in both explicit and implicit ways to positively manifest security in place branding efforts by local government and public–private inward investment associations. Marketing agencies in particular will increasingly promote the ability of cities to organise events or high-profile conferences in total safety and to ‘bounce back’ from disaster, turning what traditionally might have been seen as a negative (ie threat of attack) into a positive promotional slogan. For example, in the case of Manchester, successfully hosting major events in safety has propelled it onto the global stage and onto the short lists of elite business leaders and politicians wishing to host high-profile events in a safe and secure fashion.

In short, notions of embedded resilience increase the positive reputation of the locale whilst an external perception of an inability to respond (as so aptly demonstrated by the slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans) can significantly damage a city's reputation (see, eg, Gotham, 2007). Resilience, safety and security have thus become an increasingly important tool in the armoury of reputation managers and place promoters as security, marketing, economic development and regeneration have become necessarily intertwined.