Introduction 91

As mentioned in the previous chapters, place marketing has been commonly applied in the contemporary context of urban planning. This part of the thesis explores and evaluates the effectiveness of place marketing management as it has been practiced to date by provincial governments in Vietnam. Then it considers the applicability of the model to cities and provinces of Vietnam.

According to some researchers (e.g. Logan 2002), Vietnam has almost no tradition of urban planning, especially urban planning in relation to market mechanisms. The simple and easily- recognized reasons are that Vietnam has experienced long periods of war and of a highly centralised economy, and that there is low capacity for market economic management in general and for urban planning in particular. The fact is that almost all the cities and towns were destroyed in the wars and the economy stagnated during the immediate post-war period. The two main areas of urban planning in a market economy are spatial and infrastructure planning and policy planning. Both need to match each other and to conform to market rules. The infrastructure and spatial characteristics of urban areas in Vietnam changed little over the decades of the wars and the stagnant economy. Many urban areas are still based on the infrastructure left from the French colonial period. Over the last ten years or so, a number of central cities have changed quickly and significantly as a consequence of rapid industrialization and urbanization, most typically Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi. Nevertheless, as shown by experts and admitted by the Vietnamese authorities (Song Ha 2009), recent changes in urbanization patterns in Vietnam have basically been spontaneous. The intervention of governments at different levels has been a reaction to the urgent needs of rapid development rather than a process of planning for a stable, long-term and well- orientated urban development. In contrast to a number of the central cities which have changed rapidly, most of the provincial cities have moved slowly, challenging the efforts and desires of provincial leaders. Both the rapid, spontaneous urbanization in a number of the

central cities and the slow growth in most provincial cities illustrate the need for a development planning model. For the dynamic cities, the question is how to sustain growth and solve successfully the urban problems caused by the growth. This part of the thesis will examine whether the approach of place marketing can and does play a part in meeting these requirements.

While the advanced economies can apply sophisticated strategies of place marketing, Vietnam, with a lower level of urban management, has so far been employing only the basic activities of place marketing. The cities have currently been dealing with the matter of improving their business environment, and making it more attractive and supportive to enterprises. The intention is to improve the efficiency of provincial economic governance by removing regulatory barriers, and changing the public sector’s attitudes and the quality of their service to enterprises. These we regard as the basic activities of place marketing, and more sophisticated concepts – such as the idea of designing sophisticated place products and then professionally promoting them to specific market segments via deliberately designed channels – are still far from the minds of most provincial leaders.

The question then arises in the Vietnamese context as to whether implementation of these basic activities of place marketing has brought improved growth to individual provinces as is widely assumed. What have been the effects of these basic place marketing activities to date? These questions will be dealt with by investigating the effects of place marketing implementation, first in general in Chapter 6 and then in some specific cities and provinces in chapters 7 and 8. Subsequently, and given the findings of that investigation, the question to be addressed is how the implementation model developed earlier could be applied in Vietnam to enhance the effectiveness of place marketing. Investigations for this question are initiated in Chapter 7 and continued in Chapter 8 by searching for information on the causes of the differences in the performance of, and in the effect of, place marketing management. Then, Chapter 9 devotes all to this issue by investigating whether the application of this model is appropriate for Vietnam and searching for necessary conditions for the application of the model.

To evaluate the effect of place marketing management, two types of indicators are needed: i) indicators to measure the quality of place marketing management, called performance indicators; and ii) indicators to measure the outcome of this managerial activity, called

outcome indicators. The research studies the relationship between the level or quality of place marketing activity in a given province or city and the outcomes that might be attributed to that activity. Data drawn from several large surveys covering provinces in Vietnam for the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) are used as the performance indicators. The major indicator used to measure the outcome of the performance is the private industrial output per capita (PIO), both domestic (DPIO) and foreign (FIO). Inaddition, the study also considers other indicators: GDP, enterprise profits, investment growth. The data on the growth of investment and profits and on DPIO and FIO are gathered from official statistical sources. The next section explains the nature and source of these indicators and why they can be used to measure the effect of place marketing management in Vietnamese provinces.