Background

Nowadays, not only countries but also cities and regions communicate directly with residents in other countries using public diplomacy. Public diplomacy includes all official efforts to convince targeted sectors of foreign opinion to support or tolerate the strategic objectives of the government of a state, region or city. By branding your place to residents in other countries, you can make your place an attractive place to move to. On the other hand, you can also demolish your place brand reputation among other target groups and stakeholders.

Aim

This paper aims at discussing the role of public diplomacy in place branding for attracting new residents. We will focus on refugees. Once the refugees have obtained the right to stay in Sweden, they have the right to settle down wherever they want. However, they do not settle down in different parts of Sweden by random, but as a response to municipal public diplomacy communication strategies in branding places.

Design

We use an exploratory case study design to discuss how the two cities Borlänge and Malmö work with public diplomacy and place branding 

in attracting refugees to settle down in these cities. Both cities relied on immigrant labour but entered a painful deindustrialisation process in the late 1970s. However, in the 1990s the cities’ development took different turns. We develop a conceptual framework based on public diplomacy and place branding. The empirical material is based on policy documents decided by the respective city halls, statistics from Statistics Sweden and previous research.

Findings

The place branding of Borlänge targets just the residents. For non-residents the brand is weak and for refugees unattractive. No public diplomacy communication is reported in the policy documents from Borlänge. Malmö works actively with place branding and public diplomacy to attract new residents from abroad, and refugees re-settling from other parts of Sweden. The city is seen as a multicultural and superdiverse, a city where natives are a minority population. Unfortunately, by targeting one group of new residents so hard makes Malmö unattractive for other potential target groups.

Policy implications

Public diplomacy and place branding matters. Local and regional politicians can make their place attractive for new residents from other parts of Sweden as well as abroad, for labour migrants as well as refugees. It depends on the chosen target groups as well as place branding strategy. Place branding and public diplomacy are highly political activities and as such, they are political sensitive.