The co-creation trap in destination branding and place brand governance
When co-creation in destination branding turns into lowest common denominator design
Destination branding promised that more voices would create richer stories. In practice, many a destination and city now carry a brand identity so diluted that tourists, residents and businesses barely recognise themselves in it. When every place claims to be a unique location for authentic experiences, the community quietly understands that the branding work has failed.
Across regions, Destination Marketing Organizations and regional agences de développement have embraced co-creation as the default branding process for every place and every area. Workshops, surveys and interviews invite people who live, work and travel in the destination to shape the future destination brand, yet the resulting branding strategies often smooth away the very edges that made the destinations distinctive. In much of the academic and professional literature, the research question “What is co-creation in place branding?” is answered in similar terms: a collaborative process involving stakeholders in developing a destination's brand and wider place narrative.
The problem is not collaboration itself but how it is structured in tourism and travel tourism projects. When every stakeholder group in the community holds an informal veto, the place brand drifts toward generic marketing language that could fit any branding destination in Europe or North America. That is how a coastal city with a strong maritime identity ends up with a destination branding platform about “balance”, “quality of life” and “where people live, work and play” that could describe an inland area focused on economic development or even a landlocked nation branding initiative.
Data from Bloom Consulting’s Country Brand Ranking and Digital City Index reports indicate that roughly half of place branding initiatives fail to deliver their objectives, which should alarm every elected official and DMO director. For example, Bloom Consulting’s Country Brand Ranking 2022–2023 and the Digital City Index 2020 both highlight that many national and urban brand strategies underperform on tourism, talent attraction and investment indicators when governance is weak (Bloom Consulting, 2020; Bloom Consulting, 2023). In parallel, an MDPI article on place brand performance (for example, Kavaratzis & Kalandides, 2015, and later syntheses in Sustainability) finds that stakeholder engagement explains around seventy percent of brand success. That figure is often misread as a call to invite more people into the room, rather than to design better branding strategies and clearer governance. The co-creation trap appears when DMOs confuse the quantity of voices with the quality of editorial decisions about the destination brand and the long term destination marketing architecture.
In many Offices de tourisme, the branding process is run as if the goal were to avoid conflict rather than to sharpen identity. Facilitators ask what people love about the place, collect hundreds of sticky notes about nature, culture, gastronomy and friendly people, then compress them into a single brand identity statement that could apply to dozens of destinations. The result is a branding place exercise that ticks the box of participation but leaves tourism professionals and tourists with no clear reason to choose this location over competing destinations.
Local stakeholders sense this gap between rhetoric and reality, which erodes trust in both the brand and the institutions behind it. Residents who contributed stories about specific neighbourhoods, rivers or mountains see them vanish into abstract marketing campaigns about “vibrant communities” and “memorable experiences”. Over time, that gap weakens the social licence for tourism, undermines responsible tourism goals and makes every new branding campaign harder to justify politically.
There is also a structural bias in how co-creation is organised in tourism and travel projects. The people who have time to attend evening workshops or respond to long surveys are rarely the same people who live the sharpest edges of the place brand, such as seasonal workers, small tourism businesses or young residents considering whether to live, work or leave. This skews the branding destination narrative toward comfortable middle ground, while the most powerful stories of identity and economic development remain underrepresented.
Destination Marketing Organizations, now repositioned as ecosystem coordinators, sit at the centre of this tension between inclusion and distinctiveness. They must align municipalities, tourism businesses, residents and agencies while still delivering a clear place brand that can compete in global tourism markets. When they default to consensus, they risk producing a destination branding platform that speaks politely to everyone in the room yet fails to move any audience outside it.
The co-creation trap is therefore not an argument against participation but a warning about unmanaged expectations. If every participant believes that their preferred image of the city or region will appear in the final brand, disappointment is guaranteed and trust in the branding process collapses. DMOs need to frame co-creation as input into a curated place branding strategy, not as a referendum on every line of copy or every visual asset.
Co-creation versus consultation: who really decides the destination identity ?
Many regional tourism boards use the words co-creation and consultation as if they were interchangeable. They are not, and the confusion is one reason why so many branding campaigns for destinations end up with vague promises about quality of life and generic travel experiences. When the governance of decision making is unclear, the destination branding process drifts and the final brand identity becomes a compromise rather than a strategy.
Consultation means gathering input from people who live and work in the place, then letting a smaller expert group decide how that input shapes the destination brand and the wider destination marketing system. Co-creation, by contrast, invites stakeholders into the design room and sometimes into the final decision on the brand platform, the marketing campaigns and even the visual identity. Both approaches can work for tourism and economic development, but only if DMOs are explicit about who has editorial authority and who has veto power over the place brand.
When Offices de tourisme blur this line, they create a democratic illusion that every voice will be reflected equally in the branding destination narrative. That is rarely possible in a complex city or region where different areas have conflicting tourism strategies and different expectations about responsible tourism. Someone must decide whether the brand emphasises outdoor travel experiences, cultural depth, business tourism or the live work lifestyle that many talent attraction campaigns now promote.
International practice shows that sharper governance produces sharper brands, even in highly participatory contexts. Destination Canada, for example, has invested heavily in community engagement while keeping a clear national brand architecture that guides regional storytelling and sector specific marketing. Local communities and Indigenous partners contribute powerful stories about place, people and identity, but a central équipe curates how those stories appear in global travel tourism campaigns. Interviews and case notes compiled by Place Brand Observer underline how this combination of consultation and editorial discipline has helped Canada maintain a coherent tourism and nation branding proposition across political cycles.
For DMOs, the lesson is that co-creation should inform the brand, not write it line by line. A small editorial board with clear legitimacy — including representatives from municipalities, tourism businesses, residents and sometimes investors in economic development — should hold final responsibility for the destination branding platform. That board can use consultation data, workshop outputs and qualitative insights to shape a place brand that is both authentic and competitive.
Strategic naming is one area where this distinction between co-creation and consultation becomes very concrete. The debate over whether to brand a location by city, region or functional area often triggers strong emotions among local stakeholders who fear being erased from the map. A well-documented example is the Florida Keys, where Monroe County and tourism leaders chose to foreground the “Florida Keys” name rather than individual municipalities such as Key West or Marathon. Case material from Visit Florida and regional tourism plans shows how careful consultation surfaced concerns about identity and environmental pressure, while leaders still selected a name that worked for international tourism markets and for long term destination marketing.
DMOs should also be honest about the limits of co-creation in technical branding work. Most residents and small businesses do not think in terms of brand architecture, portfolio strategies or long term positioning against competitor destinations. Asking them to choose between subtle variations of a place branding concept or a visual identity often produces feedback based on personal taste rather than strategic fit, which can derail the branding process.
Instead, Offices de tourisme can focus co-creation on the raw material of the brand: stories, places, rituals, routes and experiences that only locals know. Professional brand teams then translate that material into a coherent destination brand and a set of marketing campaigns that can run across markets and seasons. This division of labour respects the expertise of both residents and branding professionals, while protecting the distinctiveness of the place brand from being watered down by committee.
In this model, consultation becomes a continuous practice rather than a one off event at the start of a destination branding project. DMOs keep listening to how people live and work in the area, how tourists experience the city and how businesses perceive the location as a place to invest. That ongoing feedback loop supports adaptive branding strategies and helps maintain alignment between the brand promise and the lived reality of the destination.
Curating fewer voices for a sharper place brand
There are moments when inviting fewer voices into the core branding process is not elitist but necessary. A destination that tries to please every stakeholder group with equal weight often ends up with a bland place brand that fails to cut through in competitive tourism markets. Curatorial leadership, when transparent and accountable, can protect the uniqueness of a location while still honouring the broader community.
Consider regions where the functional travel patterns of tourists do not match administrative borders. In such cases, a region level identity can outperform city marketing because visitors perceive the area as a single destination for their travel experiences. The analysis of destination branding without the place name illustrates how a carefully curated regional narrative can be stronger than a fragmented set of city brands, especially when tourism flows, transport infrastructure and natural landscapes already bind the area together in the minds of visitors.
Curating fewer voices does not mean ignoring residents or small tourism businesses. It means selecting participants who bring deep knowledge of the place, clear responsibility for tourism or economic development outcomes and the ability to think beyond their own immediate interests. This curated group can then work with professional brand teams to define the core destination branding platform, while wider consultation validates and enriches the narrative rather than rewriting it.
In practice, DMOs can structure this through tiered participation. A small strategic council, including municipal leaders, major tourism operators, cultural institutions and sometimes universities, holds responsibility for the brand identity and the long term branding strategies. A larger advisory group, representing neighbourhood associations, smaller businesses and community organisations, provides feedback on how the brand resonates with people who live and work in the destination and how it affects responsible tourism on the ground.
This structure mirrors how strong product brands operate in the private sector, where not every customer is invited to design the logo or the tagline. The brand team listens carefully to customers, tests concepts and measures performance, but retains authority to make decisions that keep the brand coherent and competitive. For a place brand, the stakes are even higher because the brand influences investment, talent attraction and the social fabric of the community.
Curatorial leadership also helps DMOs resist the temptation to chase every trend in tourism marketing. When a clear destination brand exists, new branding campaigns can be evaluated against it: do they reinforce the core identity of the place, or do they dilute it with generic promises about experiences and lifestyle. This discipline is especially important when co-operative campaigns involve multiple businesses and municipalities, each with their own short term objectives.
One recurring pattern in successful destinations is the presence of a strong narrative spine that does not change with every political cycle. Whether the focus is on outdoor adventure, cultural depth, innovation or a specific live work proposition, the core story remains stable while tactics evolve. That stability allows tourism businesses, investors and residents to align their own marketing and communication with the place brand, creating compounding effects over time.
By contrast, destinations trapped in endless co-creation loops often relaunch their branding destination platforms every few years, each time promising a new start. The constant reinvention confuses tourists, weakens the credibility of DMOs and wastes public funds that could have supported product development or visitor management. A curated approach, with clear editorial authority and transparent consultation, offers a more sustainable path for both tourism and broader economic development.
For hotel groups and private actors, understanding whether a destination operates with curatorial clarity or consensus driven vagueness is now a strategic due diligence question. A sharp, coherent place brand signals that local institutions can make difficult choices and hold a long term vision, which reduces risk for capital intensive tourism investments. In that sense, the quality of destination branding has become a proxy indicator for the overall governance capacity of the location.
Designing co-creation that protects distinctiveness and resident trust
Escaping the co-creation trap requires DMOs to redesign their processes, not abandon participation. The goal is to channel the energy of residents, businesses and institutions into a destination branding framework that preserves the distinctiveness of the place. That means setting clear constraints, defining editorial authority and being honest about what co-creation can and cannot decide.
One practical step is to start with a sharp strategic brief before any workshop or survey. The brief should define the target audiences for tourism and travel, the competitive set of destinations, the economic development priorities and the non negotiable aspects of responsible tourism. Stakeholders can then co-create within those boundaries, contributing stories and ideas that strengthen the place brand rather than pulling it in incompatible directions.
DMOs should also design participation formats that reach beyond the usual suspects. Digital storytelling platforms, mobile surveys and targeted interviews can capture insights from people who live and work in the area but rarely attend public meetings, such as shift workers, young residents or seasonal tourism staff. This broader input improves the legitimacy of the branding process while still allowing a smaller editorial group to craft the final destination brand.
Another lever is to separate the phases of listening, synthesis and decision making. During listening, every story about the city, the countryside, the coastline or the industrial zones is welcome, whether it comes from residents, tourists or businesses. During synthesis, professional brand teams and DMO strategists analyse patterns, identify the most distinctive assets of the location and test them against market data and benchmarks from sources such as Place Brand Observer and comparative rankings.
Only in the final phase do decision makers choose the core brand identity, the visual system and the priority messaging for destination marketing. At this stage, transparency is crucial: DMOs should explain which community inputs shaped the brand, which did not and why certain branding strategies were prioritised. This honesty protects trust even when not every participant sees their preferred image of the destination reflected in the final platform.
Co-operative marketing campaigns offer a concrete arena to apply these principles and avoid lowest common denominator messaging. As analysed in Region Travel’s piece on the eighty percent rule for co-operative campaigns, DMOs that reserve a majority of campaign space for the core place brand while giving partners a defined share for their own offers achieve better alignment. This balance lets individual tourism businesses promote their experiences without fragmenting the overarching destination branding narrative.
Finally, DMOs must integrate measurement into the branding process from the outset. Tracking how different audiences perceive the place, how tourists describe their experiences and how businesses evaluate the location as a place to invest provides hard données to refine the brand over time. When co-creation is anchored in data as well as stories, it becomes easier to defend bold positioning choices against pressures to soften the message.
Responsible tourism objectives should be embedded in this measurement framework, not treated as a separate agenda. If the brand promises a live work balance, cultural respect or low impact travel, DMOs must monitor whether visitor behaviour and local policies actually support those outcomes. Otherwise, the place brand risks being perceived as greenwashing, which damages both tourism and broader nation branding or regional reputation efforts.
Ultimately, the destinations that escape the co-creation trap will be those that treat destination branding as long term governance, not as a one off marketing exercise. They will use co-creation to deepen their understanding of place and people, while relying on clear editorial authority to protect distinctiveness in a crowded global market. Those are the destinations where people live well, visitors feel the difference and investors see a coherent story about the future of the area.
Key figures on co-creation and place branding performance
- Bloom Consulting estimates that around 50 % of place branding initiatives fail to meet their stated objectives, a pattern visible across several editions of its Country Brand Ranking and city performance reports, which underlines the strategic risk of poorly governed co-creation processes (see Bloom Consulting, Country Brand Ranking 2022–2023, and Digital City Index 2020).
- Research published by MDPI, including empirical studies in journals such as Sustainability and Administrative Sciences, attributes roughly 70 % of place brand success to effective stakeholder engagement, showing that participation quality matters more than the sheer number of voices involved (for example, Kavaratzis & Kalandides, 2015, “Rethinking the Place Brand: The Interactive Formation of Place Brands and the Role of Participatory Place Branding”).
- The growing focus on co-creation and equity in place branding research, highlighted by Place Brand Observer’s reviews of academic literature and expert interviews, reflects a structural shift from promotional tourism marketing toward long term governance of destinations and more accountable place brand management.