As in the case of other concepts – urban design, urban marketing, etc.
which have strongly penetrated urban Geography, the concept of branding does not belong to city or geographic science, but it is a borrowed term from economics (marketing) or, to be more accurate, geographical analyses start to take into account, more and more, especially in the case of interdisciplinary approaches, hybrid concepts, which, can highlight better certain manifesta- tions of phenomena, most times. It is the essence of science to deepen the study of cause to its roots, even if that particular science must accept non- classic methodological and analytical approaches or ones belonging to other fields, or it risks becoming “art, for art’s sake”, without being able to have any practical characteristic. 2. Definition and short history. Branding aims a set of instruments
referring to marketing, consisting, in essence, in creating a certain product image, in order to promote it. Etymologically, the term of “brand” comes from the English “burn”, rooted in the widely spread practice, in past centuries, within American farms, of marking animals owned by a certain owner, through iron burning. That was a technique used for easily identifying the owner. As a marketing technique, branding is associated with “burning” an image, a label, a trademark in the mind of the consumer.
Fig. 1 – Image of a cowboy with a burning iron for marking cattle, analogy to the origin of the term of brand3)
Equally old seems to be the idea of branding. When Josiah Wedg- wood, an English potter from the 18th century, realised that writing his name
maximally optimize the space („to squeeze out” everything it can from the capacity of the urban space in order to maximize its usage, through organising and reorganising of urban compo- nents and elements), urban design – the aesthetics of the urban space shapes (either built or open, free), urban marketing -- to promote the urban space („to sell it” to the residents, to the urban immigrants, tourists, sightseers, investors and so on), urban branding – to create an im- age, a logo of the urban spaces and subspaces. 3) Image taken from Mark Vinson, Urban branding: Vive l’difference!, Arizona Planning
Association, “Vision” Conference 2005, p. 11. 91
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