The Civic Brand: The Power & Responsibility of Place by Ryan Short — with a foreword by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn — is one of the more useful reads to land in the place branding space in years, and it deserves a spot on every DMO leader’s shelf.

Short is co-founder of CivicBrand, a place branding consultancy that has worked on engagement-driven identity, placemaking, and destination projects across the United States since 2008. The book distills that practice into a working framework — one that treats place branding as the shared layer uniting planning, community engagement, economic development, and destination marketing into a single civic story.

What the book argues

The core thesis is straightforward: place branding is not logos or slogans, and the cities and regions that treat it that way will lose. Done well, branding is the connective tissue between a community’s identity, its policy direction, and its outward-facing marketing. Done poorly, it becomes a disposable campaign that siloed departments produce on parallel tracks — and the community’s real story gets lost in the seams.

Short’s framework is rooted in identity, values, and a triple bottom line. He makes the case that fragmentation — multiple logos, competing taglines, disconnected efforts across planning, economic development, and the CVB — is the single biggest barrier to places building durable brand equity. For DMO practitioners, that will read as a mirror of the political reality most of them live in.

Who should read it

DMO CEOs and senior marketing leaders. City managers and economic development directors who share a destination with a CVB. Anyone pulling together a long-term branding or placemaking engagement and trying to get a city, its DMO, and its chamber aligned on one story. Practitioners who have been stuck in a “brand refresh” cycle that keeps producing logos instead of outcomes.

What you will take away

Three things. A sharper language for making the case that branding is civic infrastructure, not a marketing line item. A working framework for running a cross-sector place branding process that survives political turnover. And a reminder that the destinations that win the next decade are the ones that see branding as a multi-year commitment tied to community outcomes — not a campaign that ends when the contract ends.

Available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. Purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through the CivicBrand book page.