In a conversation with Los Angeles Times Asia Journal, Kyoung-kon Ko, the CEO of Daejeon International Marketing Enterprise (hereafter, DIME), discusses his thoughts on why a city branding is essential and the priorities his company and the city will have going forward.
Some cities garner more investments than others taking into account their similar locality, capital, and potential. What makes this gap? City marketing is the core of this issue. Municipalities were perceived only as an administration for citizens but nowadays they are conceived to be mainly responsible for cities’ interests and advantages brought by city marketing activities. Based on a city’s branding and reputation, promoting the city’s attractiveness to visitors, investors, current and prospective residents can bring citizens some tangible interests.
With his extensive experiences in the marketing field throughout many global companies including Coca Cola, KT, and Blizzard, CEO Ko explained, “Branding is giving certain visible elements to intrinsic value or identity of the object.” City branding and corporate branding have a common process in that sense of raising one’s value to a better position in the market. Then what is the difference between them? “City branding is the process of building narratives and storytelling about cities’ contents,” said Mr. Ko. He explains that city branding is more complex as a city implies broader identities than corporates, including public, economic, and cultural aspects. That is why the DIME, which is a city-owned marketing institution for Daejeon metropolitan city with 1.5 million inhabitants, runs its own integrated brand strategy, relying on uniqueness and utilizing various methods.
By strengthening the differentiated city identity, DIME attempts to raise the city’s global competitiveness. Mr. Ko maps out a clever tactic to constantly produce positively-framed content about the city. According to him, efficient communication regarding the potential of the city reveals the positive framework that the city has for development. The duty of the enterprise is to prevent citizens from thinking of their city based on a badly-defined image and to hold vibrant events such as the Daejeon Bread Festival and the Daejeon International Wine Festival, which can produce powerful and positive brand value.
“There is so much to show off toward global populations in Daejeon!,” said Mr. Ko. Daejeon, one hour away from Seoul, is a city where people, technology, and nature harmoniously coexist. “I can say that Daejeon is like Irvine, next to Los Angeles, which has great living conditions,” said the CEO Ko. Much more than that, pleasant residential areas and high-tech industries with highly-educated talents are well-harmonized with each other, which would catch eyes from global businesses and investors. Many of the innovative companies are working closely together in Daejeon while also competing, and this creates excellent synergies in actually bringing technologies to the market. That is why Mr. Ko strongly recommends Daejeon city as the best place for global companies to put their headquarters in Korea. The city also became a bridgehead for content production. Netflix originals, Squid Game and Hellbound, the latest craze series sweeping the whole world, were shot in Daejeon. Teaming up with the metropolitan government, DIME will put forth to bring the next shooting of global contents to the city.
Like the slogan for the city – “Daejeon is the scientific capital of South Korea”, Daejeon has a long history of smart city development, by evolving from an industrial past to the innovative city of today and implementing integrated solutions to become a sustainable city. By combining the power of data technology and the power of people, the city is creating numerous opportunities, but also posing new challenges for citizens’ better life. As Daejeon city was nominated as the host of UCLG World Congress 2022, the city is being prepared to show its leadership on the global stage. The United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is the global network of cities and local, metropolitan and municipal governments. The Daejeon city government and the DIME will harness this opportunity to secure its international recognition by promoting its position as a science capital and smart city. Daejeon will make a statement to leaders around the world as a true pioneer in city sustainability that sustainable cities which are connected and optimised through the use of technology are an unstoppable global phenomenon. Moving forward, Mr. Ko expects international partnerships and collaborations to expand even further. It is expected that through the Congress, cooperation with international innovative cities induces synergizing effects in the development of science and technology.
Next year, DIME is at the corner of a shift by changing its name from Daejeon International Marketing Enterprise to Daejeon Tourism Organization. The organization may gear up to role as a control tower to invigorate the local tourism and economy. Much of its plan is based on amplifying its attractive brand positioning, maintaining a strategic brand consistency beyond the touristic purpose of a branding manual. As the ownership of the O-World, a city-owned zoo of 682,830㎡, will be transferred to the Daejeon Tourism Organization, Mr. Ko is also shaping his idea to digitalize the zoo and to make it a global digital zoo.
Maurice Strong, who is widely acknowledged for globalizing the environmental movement in the UNEP, said, “The future health of our planet will be determined in our cities.” The city where the future was born is engaging its visitors and residents in this process of the redefinition of the city branding, changing them from passive tourists into key stakeholders of the reconstruction. Citizens and visitors will become living witnesses of a dynamic change to which they belong. “In 10 years, I see Daejeon being a city with its own differentiated brand,” said Mr. Ko. The city’s ensuing steps deserve limelights from global stakeholders.
Kayla Hong
Asia Journal
