Marketing Asian Places

Philip Kotler, Michael Alan Hamlin, Irving Rein, & Donald H Haider

As Asia enters a new era of fierce global competition for investment, people, and tourists, which places will be successful? Who will be the new Asian winners? The challenges and threats to Asian prosperity have never been greater as new opportunities arise and new threats mount at an increasingly faster rate. Nowhere in the world are the stakes for recreating development models more acute. And nowhere is the need for strategic place marketing greater. Fortunately, successful examples are everywhere.

Beijing picked up the pieces from its failed bid for the 2000 Olympic Games, worked to figure out what went wrong, and overhauled its communication and marketing program to bid for the 2008 Games - successfully. Three things accounted for its success: massive efforts to match IOC criteria, an effective government and corporate partnership, including foreign investors, and pushing the idea of a completely new venue for the Games.

Small success stories are important, too. School children in Cambodia's tiny village of Robib connect to the outside world using e-mail and the web, and villagers participate in e-commerce through their own website, www.villageleap.com. The first US$6,000 raised selling handcrafted silk products to overseas buyers was used to set up a pig farm. Places like Robib are showing that technology has a profound impact in the development of previously isolated places in Asia.

In this changing and challenging environment, places need to adopt a strategic marketing plan to maintain and developthe advances they have achieved. "Marketing Asian Places shows how to attract initial investment, maintain the development through targeted policies, and establish a high-profile investment environment for long-term growth.