Cities don't die: the life cycle of a place Cities don't die. Once declared bankrupt, Detroit has now bounced back. Anyone visiting the city today will have to admit that cities do recover. Who could have predicted forty years ago that the coal and steel industrial cities like Newcastle, Lens…
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Helsinki’s question about identity is a question about authenticity. First of all, do you know what a meatball sundae is? It’s a dish that makes most people cringe: meatballs with ice cream. Seth Godin used it as a metaphor in his book of the same name for a common mistake in marketing: combining…
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Every place is unique, even if it doesn’t have unique attractions to offer I first heard the term "moonshot" in the early 2010s in Stratford, Ontario. Someone had a very ambitious idea (in this case : Tom Patterson, an Ontarian journalist), and although it seemed far too grand (becoming the largest…
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Marketing is the management of expectations Creating a strategy is like laboratory work: if your experiment is set up correctly, the results flow naturally. Just as every product has a life cycle, so does every place, and understanding where a place is in that cycle is crucial. Each phase requires a…
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