In the 2nd Edition of Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice, author Dr Keith Dinnie presents the ICON model as a useful strategic tool for policy makers involved in the development of nation branding programmes and initiatives. Although originally designed in the context of nation brands, the ICON model can also be applied to other levels of place such as cities and regions.
The ICON model proposes that good practice in place branding should be:
-Integrated
-Contextualized
-Organic
-New
The integrated dimension of the model calls for inter-agency collaboration and the development of public-private sector programmes.
The contextualized dimension of the model draws attention to the need to ensure relevance to stakeholder needs and capabilities, and the importance of matching the values of target audiences.
The organic dimension of the model advocates a blend of planned and unplanned activities, and suggests that place branding should be rooted in the place’s identity and culture.
The new dimension of the model emphasises the need for innovative products, services and experiences, as well as highlighting the benefits to be gained from creating new place-related narratives.
For more details see Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice, 2nd Edition (chapter 10, pages 252-254).
The ICON model can be applied to any aspect of place brand management and at any stage of the place brand management process. In the first of a series of articles illustrating the application of the ICON model in various settings, Marco Bevolo and Keith Dinnie view the Dutch city of Eindhoven’s innovative use of urban lighting through the lens of the ICON model.
Urban lighting and the ICON model of place branding
From aesthetic directions to organizational governance, the combination of business modelling innovation, brand marketing communication, and design thinking increasingly represents a long-term strategic asset for those public administrations that purposely choose to focus on outdoor lighting and its digital applications and extensions.
The strategic relevance of outdoors lighting has been established since the 1990s, with the introduction of strategic programmes such as Philips’ city.people.light, designed to envision the future impact of LED technologies within the urban context. The creation of an association like LUCI (Lighting Urban Community International) in 2002, with 70 cities and 40 associated partners, confirmed this increasing focus, with cities like Lyon, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Osaka, Seoul or Turin and many others across the planet, plus industrial partners including Philips, Osram and Schreder, establishing collaborative standards and reference practices, tools and resources. European Union projects like Enigma (2013-2016) and PLUS (2010-2012) offered important opportunities for institutional dialogue and educational excellence. The impact and the potential of outdoors lighting, from dynamic master planning to anticipatory and responsive seamless systems, is key to defining the future of smart cities, from contemporary living labs for experimentation to bottom-up solutions at grassroots level.
To discuss the potential impact of urban lighting strategies on place branding, we present this short review of one city’s urban lighting strategies, framed through the ICON model of place branding. Each specific dimension of the ICON model –Integrated, Contextualized, Organic, New – will be populated by an exemplar practice corresponding to each dimension of the model.
Our selected best practice case is the city of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Here, an innovative model of governance has been defined. This process, based on a specific Lighting Strategy 2030, culminated in the signature of a long-term consortium contract among the Municipality, Philips Lighting and Heijmans. The relationship among these partners will be characterized by the common ambition to implement the latest technological roadmaps and applications, with the experimental space of several ‘living labs’ distributed throughout the municipal territory, across more and less affluent neighborhoods and two transit arteries.
What is noticeable in this approach is the inclusion of citizens in an active role, in what has been defined as the ‘quadruple helix’, namely the collaboration among public, private, educational and civic constituencies of the territory. This distinctive model of collaboration not only responds to the ambitions of inclusiveness and robustness required to democratically drive an outsourced innovation planning for a city, it is also driven by the necessity to respond to, and possibly go well beyond, neoliberalist policies that determined a fundamental shift in the role of the municipal government and the urban administration as a whole, from plain customer to member in the consortium. In particular, the purpose of living labs will be to transform Eindhoven into an ‘innovation garden city’, where not only new lighting applications but also new business models and revenue-generating mechanisms will be co-created with citizens and tested in their feasibility.
The case of Eindhoven’s urban lighting strategies will now be viewed through the lens of the ICON model of place branding (Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice, 2nd edition, Chapter 10, pages 252-254). The ICON model has the following dimensions:
The integrated dimension of the model calls for inter-agency collaboration and the development of public-private sector programs;
The contextualized dimension of the model draws attention to the need to ensure relevance to stakeholder needs and capabilities, and the importance of matching the values of target audiences;
The organic dimension of the model advocates a blend of planned and unplanned activities, and suggests that place branding should be rooted in the place’s identity and culture;
The new dimension of the model emphasises the need for innovative products, services and experiences, as well as highlighting the benefits to be gained from creating new place-related narratives.
Mapping the city of Eindhoven and its constituencies onto the ICON model provides the following outcome:
The integrated dimension sees the cross-disciplinary collaboration of industrial partners (Philips Lighting, Heijmans), knowledge institutions (TU Eindhoven) and citizens, at first orchestrated by the public bodies at the Municipality, with the long term goal to integrate each constituent into the consortium according to specific roles and newly designed relationships.
The contextualized dimension is embodied by the nature itself of the consortium, where each partner acts with the shared understanding of a Roadmap 2030, defined by TU Eindhoven (Eindhoven University of Technology), with the task to specifically deliver according to the technical, legal and organizational requirements of a complex EU tender process that over 18 months determined who would respond in the best way to the necessities of such a long term ambition.
The organic dimension of the model is represented in two ways: on the one hand, the consortium embodies the experimental boldness of the history of Eindhoven, a city where high-tech and design genius have represented the key source of marketing discourses over the last century; on the other hand, the participation of citizens at each step of the process, with the intended co-creative contribution to living labs, will magnify the vernacular character of solutions and manifestations in the spatial context.
The new dimension of the model is represented by the innovative drive of both the industrial partners, that already delivered to the city a number of iconic objects and places, from the self-illuminating highway by Daan Roosegaarde/Heijmans to the very buildings that represent the theatre where the contemporary Eindhoven brand storytelling takes place, e.g., Strijp-R with the Piet Hein Eek ‘factory’ or Strijp-S with its old factory space converted to creative industry studios and flexible media pole.
The city of Eindhoven, the fifth largest urban area in The Netherlands and the third European destination for high-tech investments (after London and Helsinki) maintains a close connection between the design of its physical traits, from the High Tech Campus landscaped by West 8 Architects to the new wing of the Van Abbemuseum by Abel Cahen, and the character of its multicultural population, a mix of inventive characters combining the second or third generation of 1960s immigrants with knowledge expats and foreign students. The lighting strategy, substantiated by the Roadmap 2030 and manifested in organizational terms by the above-described consortium, is designed to constitute another living organism in the body of assets and stories underpinning the vicarious experience of the city in popular media, scholarly analysis and other reports.