cities need to be brands that attract talent and resources. In these times when cities undertake to manage their brand identities, they need to take forgotten principles of branding, but they also need to recognize that branding in the XXI century has also new demands

1. Being authentic, being unique,
being shared:
eleven propositions for a renewed
framework of city-branding

2. The brand is the will of being and meaning something
in the consumer's mind.
Brands should always be a proposition, related to a meaningful insight

3. If a brand is not able to invoke a specific idea or value and
fails to suggest more than fuzzy things, it becomes an
"underdeveloped" brand.
Meaningless awareness is a waste of money.

4. Branding of a city should involve a "long-term plan" to build and
maintain a distinctive, positive and competitive perceptions, both
internally and externally.

5. The mastery of branding is knowing to laddering
from matter into meaning

6. …We should believe in the power of brand beliefs:
because the views and beliefs of successful brands connect with
fundamental human emotions and truths.

7. People are actively shaping brands today.
Participation and social networks are essential
in shaping and managing brands.

8. Knowledge and empathy for people is the only thing that
cannot be copied, manufactured
or become a commodity
8

9. brands might become demobrands:
spaces constantly meeting and dialogue with public.
Demobrands that can be defined as "meanings in common", in which the
owner of the brand and its target co-manage the shared meanings.

10. The branding of a city is also a lightweight form of power and
influence.
It is a kind of "soft power“, because it allows to seduce wills without coercion;
a very important form of power in a multilateral and fragmented world

11. “The love you get is equal to the love you give”