Article Politics and Space
Transformative city
branding for policy change:
The case of Seoul’s
participatory branding
Yu-Min Joo and Bokyong Seo
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
City branding has been widely adopted by entrepreneurial local governments to strengthen city
identities and to attract global attention amid intensified intercity competition. Asian global cities,
in particular, have competitively branded themselves to signal that they belong to the group of
advanced global cities. This paper illustrates the transformative role of city branding in the making
of a global city’s local identity, which has been hitherto underexplored in the literature.
Specifically, it examines Seoul’s branding exercises, focusing on its unconventional projects that
reflect the city’s recent efforts to become a ‘‘human-centered,’’ progressive city. We suggest
adding a ‘‘transformative-enhancing’’ dimension to the existing ‘‘external–internal’’ city-branding
framework, and argue that Seoul’s transformative city branding is, in fact, communicating the
mayor’s new signature policies with citizens. When combined with a strong mayor’s efforts to
cater to changing societal pressures, city branding is no longer solely a neoliberal marketing
exercise, but a political project of policy change.
Keywords
Asian global city, city branding, policy change, public participation, Seoul
Introduction
Branding has emerged as an important strategy in the public sector, particularly at the city
level. Intercity competition has intensified in today’s globalization with highly mobile
capital, and local governments have become increasingly entrepreneurial (Hall and
Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989). In their quest to attract new investment, tourists, and
residents, local governments are turning to city branding to increase their cities’ share of
attention and reputation in the global marketplace (Anholt, 2005; Anttiroiko, 2015; Kotler
et al., 1999). Common city branding practices involve catchy slogans, logos, and ad
campaigns, as well as building flagship landmarks and hosting international mega-events
Corresponding author:
Yu-Min Joo, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore
259772.
Email: sppjym@nus.edu.sg
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DOI: 10.1177/2399654417707526
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(Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005). In the process, places often become commodified, and
urban landscapes begin to mimic global city imageries (Chang and Huang, 2008; Zukin,
2009). It is not a surprise then that the term ‘‘city branding’’ is largely seen as a neoliberal
concept that prioritizes the market-oriented growth ideologies employed in late capitalist
societies.
While the city branding literature first emerged in the West, its practice has expanded
globally. Asian global cities, which have successfully caught up with their peers in economic
terms, are now competitively applying city branding to boost their symbolic images as
advanced global cities. They often advertise their achievements in rapid economic
development, modernity, and technology, and are eager to promote their image as
important global players (Bjo¨ rner and Berg, 2014; Karvelyte and Chiu, 2011; Wu and
Ma, 2006). Seoul—the capital city of South Korea with a population of 10 million—has
been no exception. Its branding efforts to create an attractive image as one of Asia’s
economic powerhouses peaked when it claimed itself as a ‘‘design city’’ in 2007, hoping to
become the design capital of the world. More recently, however, Seoul’s branding projects
have taken a surprising turn, as indicated by three anomalies.
First, at the end of 2015, Seoul said goodbye to the ‘‘Hi Seoul’’ brand that had served the
city for thirteen years and introduced a new brand: ‘‘IÁ SeoulÁ U.’’ The new brand was much
parodied and mocked by Seoul citizens, despite the government’s efforts to involve a high
degree of public participation in every stage of its development. Second, in 2014, Seoul
showcased a 63-minute movie, ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul,’’ that is a significant departure from
the typical marketing vignette designed to appeal to wide audiences. ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’’ is
a combination of 141 video clips, globally crowd-sourced, made into a post-modern film
portraying the raw reality of Seoul, both good and bad. Third, in 2012, Seoul borrowed the
concept of the sharing economy and began promoting itself as the world’s first ‘‘Sharing
City.’’ Competitive Seoul, the leader of South Korea’s growth-first ideology, now seemed to
be promoting community values of sharing with one’s neighbors.
These cases contrast with the standard approach to city branding that is typically
associated with promoting a city’s competitive assets and is often dictated by public–
private partnerships without much citizen involvement. Their strong bottom-up
contributions, allowing for diverse views and pursuit of a more socially progressive path,
appear to offer an alternative to mainstream branding practices and reflect the new mayor’s
push for big policy change. How can we analyze and interpret the unconventional city
branding that shifts away from market-oriented branding toward a more participatory
approach accompanying a new policy paradigm?
The overall goal of this paper is to contextually examine city branding from a government
policy perspective and push our understanding of the concept beyond a government’s
market-mimicry in pursuit of neoliberal agendas. Seoul’s recent branding projects serve as
an exemplary case to study the connections between city branding exercises and attempts at
policy change. It points us to the local government’s use of city branding in its effort to bring
about a new policy paradigm of citizen-centered governance. We examine how city branding
is instrumental in the policy paradigm shift, but only as a process, not an outcome. In other
words, we do not seek to evaluate what impact the city branding had on the new policy
development—an analysis and measurement that has been noted as a challenging (if at all
possible) task (Beuregard, 2008; Colomb, 2012). We limit our paper to examine the
relationship between city branding and policy change, primarily to add to the literature
on the policy-oriented transformative nature of city branding.
To study Seoul’s three branding exercises undertaken as the current mayor’s efforts at
policy changes, we first analyzed key policy documents of the Seoul Metropolitan
2 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
Government (SMG): ‘‘Seoul Brand IÁSeoulÁU Guide ver. 1.0’’; ‘‘Sharing City Seoul Policy
Implementation Plan’’ for the first phase (2012–2014) and second phase (2015–2018); the
‘‘Four-Year Policy Plan 2014–2018’’ and ‘‘Policy Implementation Plans’’ for the years 2013,
2014, and 2015. We also analyzed secondary materials, such as media reports, mayor’s
speeches, and public survey results on the branding cases.1
We conducted nine openended
in-depth interviews: two with policy advisors to the mayor and seven with civil
servants from SMG’s International Relations Bureau, Tourism Policy Division, Public
Communications Division, and Press Relations Division. We asked the interviewees about
the new brand projects and SMG’s recent policy paradigm changes, particularly from the
viewpoints of their divisions or bureaus. We cross-checked our interview data, and
triangulated our three key data sources, in order to gain holistic insights into the new city
branding projects and their instrumental role in the process of policy transformation
of SMG.
The three cases presented in this paper are not exhaustive, but are highly selective choices
of the branding exercises that are in accordance with the SMG’s efforts to develop
participatory governance under its new policy paradigm. Each represents the primary
(landscape, structure, infrastructure, and behavior), secondary communication
(campaigns, public relations, etc.), or tertiary communication (residents and visitors
themselves becoming ‘‘ambassadors’’ of the city brand) that are identified by Kavaratzis
(2004). Kavaratzis (2004) underscored the importance of aligning the three different
communication of branding, and we analyze our cases under the three schemes
framework to see how they come together to deliver SMG’s policy message.
The remaining paper is structured as follows. We first critically discuss the city branding
concept and its relevance to policy as developed in the literature, and introduce additional
(transformative and enhancing) dimensions to the existing (external and internal)
framework. We then briefly introduce the rise of city branding in Seoul under the city’s
two previous mayors, in order to contextualize our case. In the following section, we
examine each of the three unconventional branding projects as the key primary,
secondary, and tertiary communication schemes undertaken by the current mayor. In the
Discussion section, we interpret the three branding projects, paying special attention to their
bottom-up focus. Finally, we conclude by highlighting some key insights and contributions
of our paper. We argue that city branding efforts located at the transformative end of the
spectrum are not just marketing tools, but in fact serve to communicate and consolidate a
mayor’s signature policies to citizens.
City branding beyond publicity marketing
City branding, an agent of neoliberalism?
Leveraging on its strong visual and often emotion-based communicative power, city
branding is an attractive tool for local governments seeking to convey a city’s unique
identity, strengths, and competitiveness in an increasingly mediated and pluralistic society
(Eshuis and Klijn, 2012). The concept is borrowed from corporate marketing, and
unavoidably has strong neoliberal origins. It is about entrepreneurial cities constructing
symbolic images as strategies to thrive in a competitive neoliberal global scene (Brenner
and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 1989). As branding has been on the rise in the public sector,
public policy scholars have examined city branding as an urban governance process,
emphasizing the role of various stakeholders (Eshuis and Klijn, 2012; Klijn et al., 2012),
and have raised concerns relating to the democratic legitimacy (Eshuis and Edwards, 2013).
City branding is in fact often a political, rather than a technocratic, activity (Bellini et al.,
Joo and Seo 3
2010; Therkelsen and Halkier, 2011). Some authors caution that city branding led by local
elites focuses too narrowly on the positive aspects of a city and its aspirations, while turning
a blind eye to a city’s less attractive realities (Greenberg, 2008; Paddison, 1993). The
cautionary tale has been that locating city branding practices in the hands of a few
selected local elites in the public and private sectors prioritizes a capitalist agenda and
overlooks ordinary citizens and local needs (Bennett and Savani, 2003).
These concerns with the market orientation of mainstream city branding are particularly
worrisome as city branding in the public sector inherently embodies ‘‘policy changes’’
(Anholt, 2008). City branding is not only about identifying and building a symbolic
positive image that represents the city, but also about supporting the image with
necessary policy efforts. As local governments devise policies to meet the expectations of
the brand, city branding becomes much more than marketing communications (Kavaratzis,
2008). Vice versa, city branding—with its communicative power to shape an image of a
place—can be used to legitimize policy decisions that narrowly pursue urban
competitiveness under the neoliberal vision of entrepreneurialism (Colomb, 2012).
With its policy relevance however, can city branding also alternatively take part as
strategies that challenge the mainstream market-oriented discourses? In his book, Rebel
Cities (2012), Harvey brings to attention a possibility to create an alternative collective
symbolic capital based on the social relations opposing multinational capitalism.
Heightened inter-city competition necessitates an intricate balance between place
commodification and local distinction, and there remain ‘‘spaces for transformational
politics’’ (2012: 111) that allow for a progressive transformation seeking ‘‘to appropriate
and undermine the forces of capital rather than the other way round’’ (2012: 112). Here, we
can consider how a rebel mayor with enough political support might be able to attempt the
transformation of a place in a way that runs counter to the typical late capitalist ideology.
In fact, as cities increase their stature on the global stage, mayors are coming into the
limelight as important agents in today’s highly networked and globalized world. This is aptly
captured in the title of Benjamin Barber’s book, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional
Nations, Rising Cities (2013). The rising expectation for mayors to solve multi-faceted policy
challenges that are inadequately tackled by existing growth-driven strategies opens up a
window to overcome the old politics and policies of the ‘‘urban growth machine.’’ Indeed,
new policy visions and solutions require a breaking away from established regimes and
creating new forms of governance (Brouwer, 2015; Minstrom and Norman, 2009). City
branding is important not only as ‘‘policy boosterism’’ (McCann, 2013) but also as a
‘‘governance strategy’’ to achieve policy goals and to communicate with the public
(Eshuis and Klijn, 2012: 150). This is even more vital when legitimizing new forms of
governance and new policies that go against a strong pre-existing collective image (Bellini
et al., 2010). There is thus an imperative to discuss city branding and its roles in a new way,
beyond the commonly associated promoting and selling of a place amid inter-city
competition. In order to engage with city branding practices that no longer simply
conform to market-oriented ideologies, and to analyze their different positioning and
strategies, we need a more holistic and multi-dimensional framework.
The analytical framework of city branding
Conceptually, city branding is not limited solely to targeting external markets to gain a
competitive edge over other cities and attract investment and tourism, but also includes
an internal dimension (e.g., Andersson, 2014; Colomb, 2012; Kavaratzis, 2004; Therkelsen
and Halkier, 2011; Van Ham, 2008; Vanolo, 2015). In the corporate realm, internal branding
4 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
surfaced as multinational companies sought to promote identity, cohesion, and unity among
globally scattered branches (Olins, 1999). Internal city branding, similarly, is about
‘‘achieving community development, reinforcing local identity and identification of the
citizens with their city, and activating all social forces to avoid social exclusion and
unrest’’ (Kavaratzis, 2004: 70). In practice, city branding often involves both the internal
and external dimensions. We can see the emphasized role of ‘‘local ambassadors’’ in the city
branding literature as a recognition that external city branding efforts are bolstered by a
simultaneous internal element of building consensus and promoting place identification
among local residents. The question is more of where a city’s branding intentions and
practices lie along the external–internal continuum.
In addition to the existing external–internal dimension in city branding, we suggest that
there is also an important transformative-enhancing dimension. The transformative
dimension focuses on communicating a local government’s urban policy visions and
aspirations to transform the city into something new, while the enhancing dimension
seeks to positively confirm the city’s position and strengthen existing policies or
characteristics that are deemed attractive. This dimension, like the internal–external one,
exists as a continuum, with a city’s branding located somewhere between the two
poles. A brand that is closer to the transformative end would involve ‘‘place
transformation’’ of both the symbolic and material (economic) changes of a city, often
under a new governance regime. Such a concept has been framed as ‘‘place reinvention’’
(Nyseth and Viken, 2009).
Transforming the established symbolic images and economic production of a place, as
well as its governance and perhaps even the underlying ideology, is far from straightforward.
Transformation—whether of the place (Nyseth and Viken, 2009) or of the brand exercise
itself (Lucarelli and Hallin, 2015)—involves continuous and multiple processes of
assemblage and construction that are both planned and contingent, and are inherently
political. The complexity involved in transformation indicates how a transformative
branding is not likely to achieve its goal in one clear deliberate attempt. It also implies
more attention for bottom-up interests.
Local residents are particularly important, when legitimizing and facilitating
transformative efforts. As the ‘‘end consumers’’ of internal city branding, local residents
are those most affected by a city’s transformative branding measures that intend to reinvent
the place. According to Olsson and Berglund (2009: 142), ‘‘sustainable place reinvention’’ is
a ‘‘demand-oriented process in which the input from local citizens has a key role.’’ Here, we
can also see the link between the transformative and internal dimensions of city branding.
Some recent studies on public participation in city branding go even further, seeing local
residents and stakeholders as co-producers of a place rather than as consumers (e.g., Braun
et al., 2013; Hankinson, 2004, 2010; Houghton and Stevens, 2011; Klijn et al., 2012; Zenker
and Erfgen, 2014). In this view, branding should be a continuous, interactive process that
brings together the government and the general public in both decision-making as well as in
implementation and re-creation. This implies deeply engaged public participation as
opposed to a mere formal procedural participation. In fact, White (1996) analytically
divided public participation into four typologies: ‘‘nominal’’ (where participation mainly
serves the display purposes of legitimizing a project by showcasing inclusion),
‘‘instrumental’’ (where participation is a means to achieve cost-effectiveness of a project
by bringing in local labor and time), ‘‘representative’’ (where participation is sought after
to allow voices of local interests, ensuring sustainability of a project), and ‘‘transformative’’
(where participation becomes the means and ends of empowerment). The ongoing merging of
bottom-up and top-down interests in participatory city branding not only resonates well
Joo and Seo 5
with the complex process of brand and place transformation highlighted in the literature, but
also identifies closely with the ‘‘transformative participation.’’
Overall, we suggest a multi-dimensional framework, where both bottom-up and top-down
interests intersect with the external–internal and transformative-enhancing dimensions of
branding. This framework seeks to overcome the limitations imposed by a one-sided
preoccupation within city branding as a practice largely undertaken by local elites to sell
the place to external audiences. The explicit addition of the transformative-enhancing
dimension to the analytical framework enables a more accurate analysis of city brand
transformations that have a primary goal of transforming the city, backed by policy
efforts. It would set the stage for studying the transformative branding exercise from a
more comprehensive lens to see how it connects to the larger policy agenda and how it
politically strengthens the government’s policy changes.
With global cities on the rise as powerful political and economic units (Sassen, 2001), their
branding increasingly becomes involved in actively steering development trajectories and
shaping local identities and futures, not just attracting the attention of external audiences.
Yet, the literature discussed here, on place reinvention and public participation in branding,
is mostly based on small cities in Europe. Seoul’s latest branding exercises offer an
opportunity to study the empirically under-examined concept and dimensions of city
branding as contextualized in an Asian global mega-city.
Setting the scene: Seoul’s city branding
For many Asian global cities, often operating with a government-led catch-up mentality, city
branding efforts focus on the characteristics and images befitting a global city (see Karvelyte
and Chiu, 2011; Kim and Oh, 2006; Stevens, 2014). In other words, they more often than not
exercise branding, hoping to restructure and reposition cities as on par with Western global
cities. Behind this practice lies a political motive on the part of government leaders,
especially the strong mayors of the key Asian megacities, as was in the following case of
Seoul.
In the last two decades, as Korea successfully pursued development and emerged out of
poverty, Seoul has been in a race to build a globally competitive and attractive identity to
attract tourists and global investors.2
City marketing slowly began to take off following
Korea’s decentralization reforms in 1995, under which city governments and popularly
elected mayors started to compete with other cities to attract mobile capital and people
(Kim and Kim, 2011). Seoul’s branding practices accelerated under Mayor Lee Myungbak
(2002–2006), a former CEO of Hyundai Engineering and Construction. Mayor Lee
sought to apply the private sector’s efficient marketing strategies to the public sector
(Kang, 2004). In 2002, SMG organized the first city slogan contest and chose ‘‘Hi Seoul’’
to reflect the city’s friendliness.
Seoul’s ambition to brand itself as a global city peaked under Mayor Oh Se-hoon (2006–
2011), whose signature policy was the ‘‘design city’’ policy. Under Mayor Oh’s
administration, significant financial resources were devoted to ‘‘creating the image of a
global city through ‘design’’’ (Interview with a civil servant, SMG, August 2015). Mayor
Oh declared that the Seoul brand should become one of the 10 most competent ones in the
world and aimed to increase the number of tourists to 12 million a year (Lee and Kim, 2010).
Accordingly, SMG set up a new department in charge of ‘‘global city marketing,’’ which was
to work closely with multiple advertising companies (Interview with a civil servant, SMG,
August 2015). Seoul’s branding strategy also synergized with the Korean Wave—the
increasing international popularity of Korean television series and pop music (Kim and
6 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
Oh, 2006; Lee and Kim, 2010). The budget earmarked for tourism marketing in 2008 was ten
times as that of the previous year, with 80 percent of the budget spent on international
advertisements (Kim and Kim, 2011).
The city branding strategies of both Mayor Lee (2002–2006) and Mayor Oh (2006–2011)
targeted external audiences and prioritized upgrading and transforming Seoul’s image as a
competitive Asian global city. The development and implementation of these strategies, as in
branding exercises undertaken by other Asian cities, mostly took place behind closed doors.
Efforts were led by the government and private-sector experts, and seldom engaged the
public (Kim and Oh, 2006). They did not emphasize communications with internal
audiences, and relied instead on top-down approaches to bring fast developments (Cho,
2011). For ordinary citizens in Seoul, both mayors’ branding projects appeared similar to
the ‘‘growth-first’’ strategies that had previously shaped Seoul’s development. On the
surface, the city branding efforts appeared to have a transformative dimension in that
they reflected and pushed the postindustrial transformation of Seoul into an attractive
global city, but at the root, the branding exercises were more or less a continuation of the
previous regimes’ ideologies, strategies, and processes of pursuing economic growth and
competitiveness. Perhaps it only makes sense that a city branding that is truly
transformative in content and process requires a policy paradigm shift.
The role of city branding in Seoul’s new policy paradigm
A major turnaround in Seoul’s policy paradigm began when Mayor Park Won-soon came to
power in 2011, winning the by-election after Mayor Oh’s unexpected resignation. Park is a
former lawyer and a longtime human rights and social activist, and does not belong to any
political party—an unusual circumstance given Korea’s strong political party system. He
built his political power and support around the idea of a paradigm shift amidst Seoul’s
overall fatigue with growth-first ideologies. Park’s slogan, ‘‘citizens are the mayor,’’
represents an effort to transform Seoul’s top-down governance and development-driven
policies and instead promote a ‘‘human-centered city,’’ with an emphasis on citizen
engagement and public participation. Since the beginning of his administration, Mayor
Park has been committed to citizen-centered governance and has called on citizens to
participate actively in policy making and implementation (SMG, 2013b).
Park’s effort to build a citizen centered government continued after he was re-elected in
2014. In a policy debate white paper (SMG, 2014c: 2), Mayor Park underscored how ‘‘the
voices of ordinary people’’ are critical in building ‘‘Seoul of the people, by the people, for the
people.’’ Accordingly, SMG’s new ‘‘Four-year Policy Implementation Plan 2014–2018’’
promises to achieve its main policy goals through innovative strategies involving
cooperative governance and communication with the public (SMG, 2014b).3
The
government has also placed a greater emphasis on the values of sharing, fostering
cooperation, and enhancing mutual communication with local communities (Interview
with a mayor’s policy advisor, SMG, February 2014).
City branding might appear irrelevant to the new policy ideals and the values being
promoted. However, Mayor Park turned out to be very keen on city branding, albeit of a
different kind. It was necessary and critical to communicate the attempted policy
transformation, especially when the new policy agenda heavily emphasized citizencentered
governance. Branding presented an apt opportunity for such communication. We
examine three city branding projects, each of which represents a different type of brand
communication schemes—primary, secondary, or tertiary—as identified by Kavaratzis
(2004). Together, the three projects work toward creating and communicating a
Joo and Seo 7
transformed image of Seoul that reflects Mayor Park’s new policy paradigm and helps
anchor his signature policies.
IÁSeoulÁU—Secondary communication
Seoul’s development of a new city slogan—a key form of secondary communication—is a
clear effort to signal the emergence of a different Seoul under Mayor Park. SMG launched
the official Seoul brand development project in 2014, together with the mayor’s major policy
plans. The new slogan was to be made by, and for, citizens, reflecting Seoul’s new vision of a
citizen-centered city. Focusing on internal audiences, the slogan sought to act as a
transformative tool to communicate SMG’s intention of citizen empowerment. Therefore,
public participation was emphasized at every stage of the slogan development, from the
initial idea to promotion. Even the meaning of the slogan is to be continuously shaped by
the citizens—the main users. SMG refers to the new slogan as an ‘‘open-ended city brand’’
that relies on users’ own interpretations, rather than the predetermined meanings set by
experts (SMG, 2015d).
Two main groups led the project: a new Seoul Brand Promotion Committee, which
consisted of design companies, NGOs, a city council member, professors and researchers,
and 245 citizens serving as Seoul Brand Citizen Ambassadors; and a group of 80 brand
marketing experts. SMG also held 11 sessions of the ‘‘Our Seoul Story’’ talk series, where
more than 1000 citizens attended and expressed their opinions about the true identity of
Seoul (SMG, 2015b). At city hall meetings, a wide range of stakeholders discussed the
views that emerged during the talk series, and the discussions were publicized on the
official website. Based on the meetings, three key words were chosen to represent the
identity of Seoul—‘‘coexisting’’ (harmonious), ‘‘passionate’’ (enthusiastic), and ‘‘relaxed’’
(balanced). According to SMG, ‘‘coexisting’’ reflects Seoul’s philosophy and aligns well
with Mayor Park’s political philosophy, while ‘‘passionate’’ and ‘‘relaxed’’ represent
Seoul’s unique identity and its future vision, respectively. From July to September 2015,
the Seoul Brand Idea Contest was publicly held to develop a new city brand that
represents the chosen three key words. Out of more than 16,000 proposals, 30 were
shortlisted for the second round, and the list was then narrowed down by the citizen
and expert representatives to three final candidates (‘‘IÁSeoulÁU,’’4
‘‘Seouling,’’ and
‘‘Seoulmate’’). The result of an online survey was combined with the votes at the
‘‘Meeting of 1000 Citizens’’ held in October 2015. Although ‘‘Seoulmate’’ won the
online vote, all experts and 682 out of 1140 Seoul citizens at the meeting voted for
‘‘IÁSeoulÁU,’’ which ultimately beat ‘‘Seoulmate’’ with 232 votes. One and half years of
civic engagement thus culminated in Seoul’s new city brand—‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ (Figure 1). (See
Table 1 for a summary of the process.)
Figure 1. Seoul’s new brand.
Source: SMG (2015c).
8 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
Ironically, the efforts to extensively engage the public through the entire process produced
a highly contested outcome. In an opinion poll conducted in Seoul soon after the project,
only 15.6% of respondents supported ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU,’’ and almost 40% preferred the old slogan
‘‘Hi, Seoul’’ (Realmeter, 2015). The new brand was ridiculed for making little sense in
English (Jung, 2015), especially for its equivocal meaning (Jang, 2015). Seoul residents
Table 1. Road map of the Seoul brand development project.
Subject Activity
1. Survey and diagnosis  Desktop survey
 Qualitative survey  In-depth interviews with
stakeholders
 Focus-group interviews
 Quantitative survey  Online panel survey
 Social media analytics
2. Branding strategy
development
 Brand system diagnosis  Portfolio workshop
 Core-concept
development
 Civic mapping
 Citizens’ meetings
 Strategic direction
formation
 Target value development
3. Brand development  Citizen engagement  ‘‘Idea Wall’’ event
 ‘‘Design Open Canvas’’
event
 Instagram contest
 Brand idea contest
 Experts’ involvement  Slogan development
 Design development
4. Decision-making  Selection of candidate brands
 Brand registration  Application
 Registration
 Preference survey  Domestic online survey
 International online survey
 Final decision  ‘‘Meeting of 1000 Citizens’’
 Brand manuals
development
 Discussions on the
contents
 Manuals development
5. Declaration of the
new brand
 Declaration ceremony in Seoul Plaza (a small ceremony to declare a
powerful message)
6. Participatory
campaigns and
advertisements
 Online communication
channels
 Official website
 Blogs, Facebook
 Online commenting event
 ‘‘Finding the uniqueness of Seoul’’ event in association with portal
sites
 Offline communications and advertisements
 Documentary film production
 ‘‘10 second Video’’ contests
 Media advertisements
Source: SMG (2015b).
Joo and Seo 9
readily came up with parodies, expressing their discontent with the city. Starting with Liam
Neeson’s scene in the movie ‘‘Taken,’’ where he says, ‘‘I will find you, and I will kill you’’
and replacing it with, ‘‘I will find you, and I will Seoul you,’’ ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ has become a
symbolic sentence that represents negative aspects of urban life in Seoul. As one of the many
examples, ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ means ‘‘I will raise your rent,’’ in the context of Seoul’s high rental
prices (Suk, 2015). International ridicule is also expected. In Branding in Asia Magazine, an
article titled ‘‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’—the confusing new slogan for Seoul, South Korea’’ somewhat
sarcastically commented, ‘‘while the new slogan will likely get a fair share of international
ridicule, people will at least be talking about ‘IÁSeoulÁU’—maybe that was the goal all
along?’’ (McGill, 2015).
Faced with parodies and criticisms, SMG outright embraced the negative reactions, and
opened an online contest titled ‘‘Make ‘IÁSeoulÁU’ into your own Seoul Brand!’’ Citizens
were invited to come up with their own words to fill in between ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘U.’’ SMG also
published several books, such as ‘‘Seoul Brand Guide ver. 1.0 (2015d),’’ ‘‘Our Seoul Story
(2015b),’’ and ‘‘Seoul Brand Story (2015e),’’ to explain the public effort that went into
creating the new brand and to suggest ways in which the brand can be used by citizens.5
Undeterred by the initial criticisms, SMG is showing a consistent effort to engage citizens in
making the new brand their own.
For sure, ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ reflects and supports Mayor Park’s overall policy agenda to
transform the image of Seoul into a human-centered city, not only in the slogan’s symbol
and meaning, but also in the participatory development and promotion of the brand itself. It
is thus a brand transformation working at multiple layers. Attesting to the transformative
and internal focus of the exercise, Robert Koehler, one of the foreign members of the Seoul
Brand Promotion Committee, wrote for the Korea Herald that the success of ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’
‘‘will depend less on whether foreigner tourists understand it and more on whether Seoulites
themselves come to accept it’’ (2015). While the ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ campaign initially faced
difficulties, with the continued government effort to involve citizen engagement in further
shaping its meaning and promotion, perceptions are beginning to improve. A poll conducted
in October 2016 showed that 63% of the citizens were now aware of ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU,’’ and that
53% had a generally favorable perception of the slogan.6
What is puzzling is that about 60%
of respondents considered the new brand to contribute to Seoul’s global advertisement for
tourism, and about half of the respondents did not agree that the new brand strengthened
their pride for Seoul (Lee, 2016). In other words, Seoul citizens continue to perceive the new
brand as being a marketing-oriented external brand.
The ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ case was challenging because it not only involved changing the brand for
place transformation toward socially progressive political concerns—already not an easy
task—but also transforming the communication of the brand from external to internal.
City slogan is a secondary form of communication that typically serves as an external
marketing tool, and our case indicates the difficulty of changing it into an internal brand.
In other words, with audiences’ rather fixed perception of the city slogan being an external
city marketing tool, SMG struggled to narrow the gap between its intentions behind
‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ and the slogan’s reception. ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ thus highlights the important yet
difficult official branding exercise in the communication of Seoul’s new policy paradigm.
Bitter, Sweet, Seoul—Tertiary communication
‘‘Seoul, Our Movie’’ was an experimental small branding project that produced a global
crowd-sourced film titled ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul.’’ It was part of the ‘‘Global Brand
Marketing Project,’’ designed and implemented by the Culture, Tourism, and Design
10 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
Division of SMG. While the project at first appears to be a form of secondary
communication—as an official marketing project—a closer look reveals it is actually a
form of tertiary communication. The project relied on the actual representations by
residents and visitors of their ordinary lives and experiences in the city, and could be
considered a platform that brought together and shared individuals’ images of Seoul.
As implied by the title, ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul,’’ the movie’s goal was to be truthful and to
show the reality of the city, with ordinary citizens and visitors as the main characters. SMG
openly invited public submission of video clips of the city, and about 12,000 video clips were
submitted. Most were taken by mobile phones, and half were submitted from Chinese,
Americans, Canadians, and Singaporeans. A well-known Korean movie director, Park
Chan-wook, and his brother selected 141 clips from those submitted and edit them into a
63-minute documentary. The movie was broadcast live in February 2014 on YouTube and in
a movie theater. Although the film directors did the final selection and editing work, public
participation was the founding block of this collage film, as the core components were
crowd-sourced video clips. In the movie preview, Mayor Park said, ‘‘The greatest
significance of this project is the fact that everyone from all over the world made this
movie together. This is what makes this project truly meaningful. [. . .] by sharing each
other’s own experience and feeling of Seoul, we were able to create a special movie that
illuminates the undiscovered images of Korea. The honesty and truthfulness of Seoul shown
in the movie is what actually distinguishes the city’’ (PR Newswire, 2014).
The quotidian urban life scenes captured through the eyes of the general public were far
from the highly selective and beautified images that typically appear in city advertisement
films, such as iconic landmarks, spectacular natural environments, rich culture, and historic
heritage sites. Instead, there were images of people going to work early in the morning to fish
markets, retail shops, and post offices; people busking and attending festivals; students
cramming for exams; and religious gatherings and activities. The film also did not shy
away from showing the darker side of the city, including violent citizen protests against
the government, a bridge collapsing, and the infamous burning down of Korea’s first
National Treasure Sungnyemun (the historic South Gate of Seoul). Unlike short and
attractive vignettes designed for TV commercials or billboards, the film is currently
available on YouTube only, and does not communicate itself as the city’s official
promotional video.
In our view, ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’’ was an effort to enhance the tertiary communication
of ‘‘word of mouth, reinforced by media [. . .] not controllable by marketers’’ (Kavaratzis,
2004: 69). Local citizens and foreigners were symbolically brought together to produce a
movie that showed the city’s raw reality, without any particular perspective imposed, and
allowed for viewers’ own interpretations (Park, 2014). The movie project appears to be about
evoking and reinforcing Seoul’s ongoing policy transformation and identity building project.
It also closely followed Mayor Park’s new cultural policy projects, which promoted public
participation in creating media content to advertise Seoul’s neighborhoods using common
devices (e.g., mobile phones) and sharing the outputs widely via social media (e.g., YouTube)
(SMG, 2013b). While the hour-long crowd-sourced film’s publicity effect for Seoul has been
somewhat limited,7
the unconventional project is significant not only in communicating but
also in exercising one of Mayor Park’s participatory cultural policies at the city-wide scale.
Seoul, the sharing city—Primary communication
The ‘‘sharing city’’ vision of Seoul has been SMG’s major economic policy since 2012. It is
Mayor Park’s pet policy project that represents Seoul’s new transformative pursuits under
Joo and Seo 11
his larger policy agenda, seeking to develop a sharing economy and culture among the
public. The branding of Seoul as a sharing city can thereby be construed as a primary
form of communication in that it is a concrete action to transform the economic
infrastructure of Seoul.
As the first global city to officially label itself as a sharing city, Seoul has received
international recognition for publicly disseminating the sharing culture throughout the
city. The online magazine, ‘‘Shareable,’’ introduced Seoul’s sharing city policy and
explained how ‘‘by putting the city’s stamp of approval on select sharing services, the city
builds the public’s trust in the sharing economy and introduces citizens to proven and trusted
sharing services’’ (Johnson, 2013). In 2014, Seoul was awarded an Honorable Mention at the
fifth Metropolis Awards for its ‘‘Sharing City’’ project. In McLaren and Agyeman’s book,
Sharing Cities (2015), Seoul is introduced as the second case study after San Francisco, the
largest center for the sharing economy in the United States.
SMG’s sharing city agenda focuses on reviving and rebuilding a community spirit and an
identity that is inclusive and convivial. This is in contrast to the San Francisco type of
sharing city that is motivated by commercial interests. Seoul’s sharing city vision aspires
to maximize utilization of existing resources, recover trust and relationships among citizens,
and revitalize the city’s economy (SMG, 2012). Its main strategies involve sharing with each
other what people already have, such as idle materials (e.g., toys, clothes, books, cars),
spaces (e.g., parking lots, houses, public facilities), knowledge, labor, and information. It
also leverages on Seoul’s highly networked infrastructure to emphasize tech-enabled sharing
(SMG, 2012).
Public participation in Seoul’s sharing city initiative manifests itself in two ways. First, in
order for the sharing economy to work, citizens must actively participate and be willing to
share commodities with others. Second, and more important, SMG relies on cooperation
between citizens and the government (Song, 2013), again representing the Mayor’s core
policy tenet. This distinguishes Seoul’s practices from those of other sharing cities.8
SMG
created a Sharing Promotion Committee to make important decisions on the policy and has
partnered with grassroots citizen organizations and tech startups. SMG has also focused on
developing ‘‘super-sectoral social innovation,’’ involving the government, citizens, and the
private sector (McLauren and Agyeman, 2015: 77). As a result, the sharing economy has
expanded rapidly in Seoul over the past 3 years. The number of social enterprises
participating in the sharing economy grew from 37 in 2013 to 63 in 2015; in April 2015,
SMG announced a comprehensive plan for the second phase of the sharing city policy.
Furthermore, there is a consensus on the value of sharing among the general public
(Kang, 2015). A public survey conducted in Seoul in May 2016 showed that most
respondents (95%) are roughly or fully aware of Seoul’s sharing city projects. Among
users of the sharing economy services, 83% were generally satisfied (SMG, 2016).
Simultaneous with these efforts to build social consensus and a local identity of the
sharing city within Seoul, SMG has actively publicized the sharing city brand by hosting
a number of international conferences and events to introduce its sharing city policy in
action. It sponsored the development of the Creative Commons ‘‘Share Hub’’ platform,
which provides the latest information and data on Korea’s sharing movement in English
(english.sharehub.kr). Subsequently, SMG has been invited to various international
conferences to introduce Seoul’s sharing city policy (Kim, 2016), turning the innovative
economic policy into a powerful city brand that can be publicized globally. Seoul received
the ‘‘Place Marketing Award’’ in March 2016 at the Place Marketing Forum in recognition
of its experimental policy innovations in the sharing economy model. The sharing city
agenda thus helps to brand Seoul internationally as an innovative urban hub. Seoul is
12 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
gaining attention for a branding approach that is in stark contrast with the competitive
agendas that Asian global cities typically emphasize. Mayor Park’s transformative economic
policy itself is becoming an effective example of primary communication at work, both as
internal and external city branding.
Discussion: Seoul’s participatory branding for transformation in
governance
The three city branding projects examined in this paper illustrate SMG’s use of the primary,
secondary, and tertiary branding communications as tools to consolidate local identity and
to help build political consensus around the mayor’s effort to build a ‘‘human-centered city.’’
The distinctive characteristics of the three projects are the result of efforts to communicate
and support the city’s new identity, with an emphasis on residents and their well-being rather
than on economic competition. In particular, the projects were participatory, with residents
as both the key consumers and producers of the branding.
To further elaborate, each of the branding communication schemes underscores public
participation, deliberately showcasing the new policy ideology and governance model. The
bottom-up emphasis aligns with the new citizen-centered policy paradigm and signals a
transformation away from the growth-driven, top-down governance approach used in the
past. However, public participation can take many different forms and serve different
interests, as identified by White (1996), mentioned earlier in the paper. Seoul’s branding
case stands out precisely because of its overarching analysis indicates emphasis on
‘‘transformative participation,’’ with both top-down and bottom-up interests ultimately
aiming for citizen empowerment.
To further elaborate, public participation in Seoul’s new brand campaign was not simply
a gesture toward public participation in the development of the city brand: citizens were
placed at the center, as critical actors involved in shaping the meaning and use of the ‘‘openended
brand,’’ ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU.’’9
Similarly, the ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’’ movie project was made,
and its outcome was to be freely interpreted, by residents and visitors, thereby being a
platform to reinforce Seoul’s tertiary brand communication. In these two projects, public
participation did not merely seek to legitimize a brand that was predetermined and
promoted by the city government and experts. Rather, it was an exercise to communicate
that citizens and the public are the true owners of the city, and are themselves capable of
developing the brand and creating the image of Seoul. For the primary communication
of implementing the specific economic policy (sharing city), SMG emphasized the role of
citizens in its governance. Seoul’s ‘‘sharing city,’’ which is centered on reviving and
rebuilding a local community spirit, itself embodied the idea of citizen participation as
pivotal in transforming a part of city’s economic infrastructure from the bottom up. In
short, when considering the means and ends of the public participation holistically across
the various brand communication schemes, citizen empowerment was at the core of their
practices and symbolic goals.
We interpret Seoul’s city branding projects that accompany Mayor Park’s policy
paradigm shift to be about bringing forth ‘‘transformative participation.’’ The newly
pursued image of Seoul is a city that citizens are able to meaningfully contribute to from
the bottom-up, which is in stark contrast to Seoul’s past experiences dictated by growth
agendas driven by government-corporate collaborations. In a way, Mayor Park acted as a
‘‘policy entrepreneur’’ (Kingdon, 1984), taking advantage of Seoul residents’ overall
discontent with the long-practiced top-down growth-focused approaches to launch a
transformative policy agenda. He pushed his signature agenda by working to shape both
Joo and Seo 13
top-down interests (of himself and SMG) and bottom-up interests (of Seoul citizens) toward
citizen empowerment, transforming the entrenched power relationship between citizens and
the government. This intention to transform governance was visibly conveyed, through the
actual practices of the branding projects and their highly communicative nature. By
communicating and experimenting with the key intentions for the transformation in
governance, city branding was instrumental in consolidating the mayor’s new policy ideals.
Seoul’s case reveals how city branding is able to serve as a policy communication tool that
seeks to reinvent the city around internal local identities, as it expresses and applies the new
policy paradigm. Its transformative nature is not limited to producing a transformed city
image as an outcome decided by elites (including select private and public actors); it goes
further to communicate the idea that citizens should develop the changed image and its
interpretations (with the assistance of the government and experts). It thus symbolically
implies a reallocation of power and a transformation of governance. Overall, we explain
Seoul’s series of branding activities as coming together to signify the mayor’s intentions to
facilitate citizen empowerment within a larger goal of governance transformation. The place
and brand transformation takes place within a complex mix of dynamic and continuous
processes, and we expect Seoul’s transformation in governance to involve various
communication efforts over time. As Seoul rebrands itself using primary, secondary, and
tertiary brand communication schemes, the mayor’s new policy agenda becomes loud and
clear.
Conclusion
This paper seeks to expand the understanding of city branding by using a multi-dimensional
framework that includes both external–internal and transformative-enhancing components.
Thus far, the mainstream literature on city branding practices and concepts has revolved
around the intensified use of city marketing strategies as part of neoliberal inter-city
competition. Our framework adds a transformative dimension and opens up the
possibility to analytically examine the diverse intentions and strategies of city branding.
Seoul’s latest branding projects are a case in point for showcasing how city branding
buttresses the mayor’s policy intentions to transform the city and encourage citizen
empowerment. It indicates an alternative city branding that leverages on and highlights
the hitherto underemphasized transformative values of city branding.
What is particularly new about our paper is the introduction of how city branding is able
to target other more progressive intentions that widely depart from the assumed and
entrenched market-oriented goals as instances of neoliberalization. The transformative
nature of city branding has been mentioned elsewhere, for example, in the place
reinvention and brand transformation literature. It is also easy to imagine city branding
being employed to transform struggling cities’ economic structures and identities, with the
expectation that the branding will help them to revive and thrive in a changing global
economy. Here, we can think about the different layers of transformation that can take
place: a city branding exercise may be transformative in its strategies, goals, or its
overarching ideology—or a combination of the three. Seoul’s case stands out because it
involves transformation at all of the different layers, including the ideology.
Last but not least, our paper contributes to the literature on the branding of Asian global
cities that has lopsidedly focused on competitiveness and external markets. These growth
agendas are no longer as sustainable and are increasingly being challenged (Douglass, 2000;
Ho and Douglass, 2008). Asian global cities thus find themselves in a position to transform
their identity in a way that resonates better with local residents. While there is a need for
14 Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 0(0)
strong internal branding to provide a meaningful identity of a place to its residents,
mayors—with huge political leverage and motivation—can act as key agents of policy
paradigm shift, which in turn can be reflected and elevated by city branding. As
globalization intensifies, these transformative and internal dimensions warrant
significantly more attention within the current debates on city branding than they have
received so far. We hope our paper acts as a first step to trigger further discussion.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This research has been financially supported by a grant from the Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.
Notes
1. The analysis of ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’’ project was mainly based on the secondary data due to the
unavailability of official policy documents.
2. For Seoul, the challenge was made especially difficult by its relatively recent history of utter
destruction during the Korean War (1950À1953) and its hasty reconstruction afterwards. As
Korea pursued development from the 1960s to 1980s to overcome dire poverty, city branding
was not the government’s priority: Seoul had more urgent urban problems to address, including
providing housing, transportation, and other urban infrastructure for a rapidly growing population.
3. The plan pledged four key policy goals: to make Seoul into a ‘‘Safe’’ (from disasters and crimes),
‘‘Heart-warming’’ (with expanded welfare), ‘‘Dreaming’’ (through creative economy, culture, and
tourism), and ‘‘Breathing’’ (with green spaces and clean energy) city (SMG, 2014a).
4. ‘‘I.Seoul.U’’ (with the periods (.) between the words) was the proposed and initially selected slogan.
After its selection though, specific concerns were raised over the disconnectivity implied by the
periods, and SMG replacing them with middle dots (Á) (SMG, 2015d). For both before and after the
change, we write ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ throughout the paper.
5. ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU’’ is available for both for-profit and nonprofit use by individuals and corporations. The
new brand is available for-profit purposes to those who are based in Seoul, and as long as they sign
up to become the member of the ‘‘Seoul Brand Partners.’’ They can either use the brand in their
products, or use the brand by replacing ‘‘Seoul’’ with their product brands (or the name of NGO or
an image for nonprofit uses) between ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘U.’’ ‘‘Seoul’’ must be added back below the new
word or image that replaced it (SMG, 2015d).
6. This is also in line with our Google search that we conducted to grasp the overall response trends of
Seoul’s new brand in November, 2016. Using the keyword ‘‘IÁSeoulÁU,’’ we analyzed the first 10
webpages (84 websites), categorizing each site into ‘‘negative,’’ ‘‘neutral,’’ or ‘‘positive’’ response.
Among the 30 ‘‘negative’’ responses, 22 were reported between October and December, 2015, when
the new brand was just launched; among 25 ‘‘positive’’ responses, 15 were reported in 2016.
7. ‘‘Bitter, Sweet, Seoul’’ today has only been viewed about 52,000 times total. The popular Gangnam
Style music video, which was filmed in Seoul and became YouTube’s most watched video within
just four months of its release, and now has more than 2.5 billion views, probably has had more of a
publicity impact on Seoul.
8. The San Francisco model is led by the private sector and the European model is led mainly by the
government (Song, 2013).
Joo and Seo 15
9. Without including this latter part of open-ended brand to holistically evaluate the project, the
slogan development part of the brand development alone could be seen as a mix of nominal and
representative participation, instead of transformative. It could be interpreted as the
government’s desire to develop a well-supported, sustainable brand by allowing citizens a voice in
the development (representative participation), but seemingly a mere symbolic display of nominal
public participation. By no means are 1000 citizens a good representation for a mega-city of
10 million.
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Yu-Min Joo is an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National
University of Singapore. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She researches and publishes on urban
development and policy issues in Asia that is undergoing political, economic, and social
transformations. Some of her current research topics include city branding, urban
governance, smart cities, megaprojects, and mega-events.
Bokyong Seo is a research associate in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the
National University of Singapore. She obtained her MSc in Urbanism from Delft University
of Technology and her PhD in Urban planning and design from the University of Hong
Kong. Her research has focused on housing and urban policy, urban regeneration, and
planning governance in East Asia.
Joo and Seo 19