Every city wants to attract investment. Few know what they have to offer beyond tax incentives and cheap land. And tax incentives can be copied; any neighbouring city can match or surpass them. What cannot be copied is uniqueness, and it is this that determines, in the long term, which city attracts lasting investment.
Why most investment attraction strategies fail
The most common strategy is a list of competitive advantages: strategic location, skilled workforce, logistics infrastructure, tax incentives, quality of life. The problem is that this list is identical to that of hundreds of other cities. When everything is an advantage, nothing stands out.
The second mistake is to confuse investment attraction with promotion; cities spend fortunes on trade missions, participation in trade fairs and promotional materials without having a strategic narrative to underpin their communication. The investor listens to the presentation, receives the brochure, goes home and forgets it, because there was nothing memorable, nothing unique, nothing that stuck.
The third mistake is not knowing what type of investment the city is positioned for. A city cannot be good at everything at the same time; attempting to please all investor profiles results in a generic proposal that fails to convince any of them.
What defines a city’s territorial competitiveness
A city’s competitiveness is the combination of a clear strategic identity, genuine and well-articulated strengths, and the ability to communicate all of this coherently to the right audiences. It is not just what the city has, but what it is capable of doing with what it has.
Strategic identity is the starting point. A city that does not know what it is cannot tell an investor why they should be there. A city that knows its uniqueness has a narrative that underpins any conversation aimed at attracting investment: with the industrial investor seeking a supplier ecosystem, with the property fund manager assessing potential for appreciation, with the technology company needing talent and quality of life for its employees.
Vocation is the second pillar. Every city has vocations – the set of activities towards which its territory, culture, infrastructure and people are naturally oriented. The strategic task is to identify these vocations, prioritise them and create the conditions for them to flourish. Cities that try to be everything attract nothing.
Cities that focus on their vocation create ecosystems that reinforce themselves over time.
Consistent communication is the third pillar. It is not about marketing; it is about alignment. All communication from the city, from different departments, private entities and external representatives, must tell the same story. A story that is not promotional, but strategic.
The role of place branding in attracting investment
Place branding is the framework that organises all of this. It identifies the city’s unique qualities, articulates its strengths, defines priority audiences and creates the Singularity that guides all narratives. It is the work that takes place before any campaign, trade mission or participation in a trade fair.
What N/LF does in this context
N/LF’s work with cities seeking to attract investment begins with identity research, listening to residents, local leaders, established businesspeople, public officials and the wider community. Not to find out what they want the city to be, but to discover what it genuinely is.
From there, we build the strategic positioning: the uniqueness and distinct narratives for each priority audience. And we connect this positioning to Place Strategic Foresight©, exploring multiple future scenarios to ensure that the positioning is robust enough to withstand economic, regulatory and behavioural changes.
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