The marketing management of cities and metropolitan areas: from product orientation to marketing orientation

The application of marketing principles in the administration of cities has been usually reduced to the use of the communication tools to try to diffuse the city’s image among the different target publics. At the same time, the development of cities has habitually been based on the endowment of infrastructures and singular buildings, by means of relatively opaque strategic planning processes. From a marketing vision, we consider indispensable to base the development of cities on the active citizenship participation, as well as in the empowerment of the tangible and intangible aspects. In the case of the Metropolitan Bilbao, the strategic plan that has been developed in the last decade was centred on tangible elements, while the new plan puts a special emphasis on the intangible aspects and civic participation.