City Branding: A Conceptual Study for the City of Semarang

Semarang is a city which known for their culinary, education, and rich cultural heritage. There are many possibilities and opportunities lies for the city to prosper and benefits more, but yet until now the government has not yet fully utilized them.

This study will try to elaborate on the idea how to brand city, and what previous studies has been done in the past in the cities all around the world to re-brand a city.


This paper do not intented to find a solution for city branding of Semarang, but more to find the methodology on how to brand and re-brand city.

From the previous studies we can conclude that there are three steps which should be done in order to create a city brand. The first step is to identify what brand should this a city has. The second step is by create a positioning for the city brand. And the last step is to create the image for city.


Makalah ini dipublikasikan pada Seminar Membangun City Branding Kota Semarang, Dipenogoro University di Semarang, Indonesia pada tanggal 9 Agustus 2011 dan ditulis oleh Aswin Rahadi, Alia Widyarini Hapsariniaty.