Why cities need to harness communications to grow and thrive

Global cities are at the vanguard of collaboration, innovation and prosperity. Today, approximately 56% of the world population – some 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities, and the World Bank estimates that will rise to 70% by 2050. As a result, cities account for 80% of all global GDP and are the de-facto destinations of choice for both human movement and inward business investment.

In response to this persistent growth, and allied to other macro challenges, the built environment continues to evolve. Solutions to economic and environmental challenges and technological advances will emerge in the world’s established and emerging cities.

ING Media is the only communications consultancy that navigates the broad church of sectors that make up the built environment, helping brands, organisations and cities thrive. Our pioneering research is designed to help leaders understand the power and potential of effective city promotion and brand activation through communications.

Our “Most Talked About Cities” research, now in its fifth year, is an established component of this. We measure cities’ digital output, ranking them by their conversations and providing insight into the impact digital messaging is having on cities as brands.

This year, we have extended that research to incorporate a new Soft Power index. This has been designed to measure largely unquantifiable city-based criteria based on environmental, cultural, and social measurements to score and rank the UK and Europe’s top cities.

Like nation states, cities are significant sources of soft power. Soft power involves ‘positive attraction and persuasion to achieve objectives,’ in contrast to hard power, which might best be described as ‘control by coercion’. With the return of coercive hard power in Eastern Europe, the value of cities’ persuasive soft power needs reemphasising. This can often be achieved at a national or subnational level through two main vessels: diplomacy – a systematic attempt by governments or city leaders to direct common values of business objectives to external audiences; or through cultural relations – fostering international dialogue to forge longer-term relationships between organisations and nations.

At ING Media, we recognise the value that activating that soft power can bring – and have therefore developed a study to understand the effect of messaging of soft power on cities’ future growth prospects.

Our analysis shows that a series of direct positive correlations exist between digital visibility and soft power, gross domestic product and cumulative regional foreign direct investment. Allied to this, we have aggregated these metrics into a unified benchmark – our overall “Investment Opportunity Rank”. This is a succinct measurement to rank cities by how digital performance affects economic output. The findings are stark. Where digital visibility leads, prosperity and investment follow:

• An elevated soft power profile can improve both GDP and FDI. Increasing awareness around cultural assets leads to improved resident, tourist and business spend, enabling a city to grow and prosper.
• Our “Investment Opportunity Rank” is not determined by one single element, but increasing digital output can lead to improved performance across GDP and FDI.
• International and domestic investors seek to deploy capital into cities and their cultural assets, to exercise their own soft power and ESG compliance. Communicating soft power increases a city’s “pull,” which helps to develop long-term value to investors.
• Future investment opportunity prospects are dependent on a variety of social and economic indicators, yet scoring highly in digital visibility and soft power directly influences future investor intent.

As the UK looks to emerge from a productivity slump and economic inertia, communicating the very real benefits of growth to the public is more important than ever. Utilising soft power can work in a city’s favour, especially as our urban destinations clamour for inward investment. In recent years, political language has lurched from ‘levelling up’ to ‘building back better’ and from ‘enterprise zones’ to galvanizing devolution. Yet real estate has struggled to build a strong narrative around its very central role in this.

The elements of density, proximity and diversity underpin what economists call ‘urban agglomeration’ – the clustering of people and economic activity in space – which allows access to larger and more diverse talent pools, and encourages and facilitates the ready exchange of information, knowledge and ideas. Cities are at the forefront of this. Communicating this effectively through increasing digital visibility is paramount to activating city prospects and enabling UK plc to navigate economic and environmental headwinds in the future.

For example, London (first) continues to be the UK’s most talked about city, followed by Liverpool (second), Manchester (third), Edinburgh (fourth) and Glasgow (fifth). These cities list first, fourth, second, eighth and fifth respectively in our ranking of  ‘Investment Opportunity’ and the correlation between both data sets across all 50 cities in our study is very strong.

Activating the power of a city’s soft power asset is prerequisite to its economic success. In an age where the channels of digital communications are changing, understanding how to market these assets to audiences will go a long way to unlocking place branding, fostering goodwill amongst residents and tourists, and ultimately, encouraging inward investment.