Events are among the most visible, and most misunderstood, instruments in Place Branding. They can move economies, reshape skylines, and change how the world feels about a destination. They can also drain public budgets, leave behind stadiums nobody needs, and damage a reputation rather than build one.
As Jose Filipe Torres and Richie Karaburun argue in Nation and Place Branding: An Applied Approach to Building the Image of Countries, Regions, and Cities, events influence both the tangible experience of a place (its infrastructure, economic activity and tourism flows) and the intangible one (its perceptions, emotions and identity). What they are not is a strategy in their own right. In the Bloom Consulting SpiderBrand© framework, events sit within the quadrant of Policies, the Actions, Activities and Projects a place undertakes, and they only work when they are integrated into a wider Nation and City Branding strategy.
Why events promise so much
Among the instruments available to policymakers and Place Brand managers, events promise the most and guarantee the least. They are not a shortcut to global recognition and treating them as one is the most common and most expensive mistake in Place Branding. Their real power lies elsewhere. Unlike a campaign or a slogan, an event is an experience. It allows a place to communicate its narrative directly to international and domestic audiences, and to build an emotional connection that no advertisement can replicate.
In the book’s framing, an event is a multifaceted initiative that interprets the social identity and values of a community, through its venues, speakers, programming, and even its catering and decor, and broadcasts those stories far beyond local borders through media coverage. Understood this way, a well-chosen event becomes a valuable Brand Touchpoint, a moment where audiences encounter the brand directly and form an impression of it. Understood as a standalone spectacle, it becomes an expense.
What are special events
A special event, in the definition the book adopts from Matthews, is a gathering of human beings, generally lasting from a few hours to a few days, designed to celebrate, honour, discuss, sell, teach about, encourage, observe, or influence human endeavours. They are, in short, out-of-the-ordinary occasions, and that quality of being out of the ordinary is precisely what gives them their power to capture attention and generate emotional engagement.
Events resist tidy categorisation. They span festivals, exhibitions, sporting competitions, conferences, religious celebrations and community gatherings, differing widely in scale, duration and audience. The book deliberately avoids a single, universal classification, because scholars have long argued that one is impractical. What matters theoretically is that each place classifies events according to its own branding objectives and development strategy, rather than importing a generic taxonomy. Underneath any classification sits good governance and clearly assigned responsibilities, the structures that determine who decide which events a place should pursue, and why.
Measuring what an event actually delivers
If events are difficult to classify, they are harder still to evaluate, and this is where theory matters most. There is no universally accepted framework for assessing an event’s impact, and the absence of one too often produces superficial assessment: a visitor survey, an official’s impression, a count of headlines. The book argues for something more rigorous. Evaluation criteria should be agreed before an event is hosted, not improvised afterwards, and they should recognise that the most significant impacts are holistic, affecting the place as a whole rather than a single sector.
The concept increasingly used to capture this is leverage: building impact assessment into the earliest stages of planning so that stakeholders can deliberately steer an event toward lasting outcomes. Rather than asking after the fact whether an event worked, leverage treats the long-term result as something designed in from the beginning. The theoretical shift is from event evaluation as accounting to event evaluation as strategy.
Are all events worth hosting?
No, and the honest answer is theoretically important. Large-scale events demand significant public investment, and their returns are far from guaranteed. The evidence consistently finds limited support for the claim that mega-events produce sustainable economic gains. A substantial share of the revenue they create leaks out of the host location, and much of the local spending merely redistributes money that would have been spent anyway. When infrastructure built for an event has no purpose afterwards, the gap between promise and reality can actively harm a Nation Brand rather than enhance it.
The lesson, consistent across decades of mega-events, is that the long-term impact of an event depends not on the opportunity it offers, but on the strategic planning and coordinated action behind it. Hosted at the right moment, as part of a strategy, and revealing something genuinely true about the place, an event can repair and elevate a Nation Brand. Hosted for its own sake, it becomes an expensive way to achieve less.
The three benefits of strategically integrated events
When events are integrated into a Place Brand strategy, the book groups their benefits into three kinds.
The first is economic and infrastructural. Events generate visitor spending, create employment, some of which persists well beyond the event itself, and act as a catalyst for development already underway, often leaving behind a legacy of transport links, public spaces and venues.
The second is Placemaking. The relationship is so close that the book describes events themselves as acts of Placemaking. Through festivals, cultural celebrations and community gatherings, places strengthen local identity and social cohesion, and residents, who understand their own place better than anyone, become its most credible brand ambassadors.
The third is reputational. Events build experiences, narratives and content that generate media coverage and conversation, reshaping the mental image audiences hold of a place.
Aligning events with the Central Idea
Across all three benefits, the through-line is the Central Idea©: the positive emotion a place wants to trigger in its audiences whenever they experience, hear about, or think of it. Through their themes, programming and communication, events can reinforce the specific attributes a place wants to own, whether innovation, sustainability, cultural richness or hospitality. Before committing, Nation and City Brand managers should identify which of Bloom Consulting’s Perception Elements an event genuinely influences, and then test it against three questions:
- Does the event align with the place’s target audiences?
- Are its associations compatible with the place’s current or desired Perception Elements and Central Idea?
- Is it relevant and beneficial to the local population, who can serve as brand ambassadors?
An event that cannot answer these questions convincingly does not belong in the strategy, however attractive it may appear in isolation.
Conclusion
Events play a multifaceted role in Nation and Place Branding, acting as catalysts for economic growth, social cohesion and reputation. Because they offer an experience rather than a message, they let a place communicate its identity and values directly, and when they carry the Central Idea, they become one of the most powerful Brand Touchpoints available.
But no event, whatever its scale, comes with a guaranteed legacy. Events are not a panacea, and they are not a shortcut. They are powerful instruments that reward a clear vision and sustained effort, and punish the absence of it. The challenge for places is not to host more events, but to ensure that each one contributes meaningfully to a coherent, enduring narrative: to move from being a place that merely hosts events to becoming, in the book’s words, an “eventful” city, region or country.
Cite article: Bloom Consulting (2026): The Role of Events in Nation and Place Branding. Bloom Consulting Journal, 17 June. Available at: https://www.bloom-consulting.com/journal/the-role-of-events-in-nation-and-place-branding/
