Baudrillardian examination of municipalities as public relations and marketing firms

Local governments are adopting both the rhetoric and practices of market-based governance interventions. Imported into these cities are public relations and marketing tactics to sell cities to internal and external audiences alike. Public communication in these cities went from a public information focus hinging on a just-the-facts approach to a public relations and marketing focus on selling and image generation to please customers. Acute attention to image generation leads to the metaphor of municipalities presented in this research - as public relations and marketing firms. Private sector public relations (PR) and marketing firms gain results for their clients, usually in the form of consumer consumption. A city acting as a public relations and marketing firm puts priority on the image-generation potentials of nearly all its governance functions to sell a commodity to customers. To illustrate this, a six-point model was devised of PR and marketing tactics used in cities operating as public relations and marketing firms: branding, media relations, in-house publications, use of volunteers and outside organizations as PR tools, aesthetic and affective appeal, and sustainability and going green. A city using all six is a fully realized PR and marketing firm, as it adopts, adapts and executes the tactics in meaningful ways. An over-reliance on image-generation (PR and marketing) versus substance (information) pushes public organizations through Baudrillard's four phases of the image. The image of the city becomes dissociated with reality, and the government operates in a simulation of itself. This research uses Qualitative Media Analysis (Altheide, 1996) supplemented by a discourse analysis method created for this research - Baudrillardian Discourse Analysis.