Globaliseringens påverkan på platsmarknadsföring och konkurrens mellan städer. : Hur arbetar Umeås aktörer för att marknadsföra staden som en mötesstad inom affärsturism?

ABSTRACT This bachelor thesis aims to study the effects of globalization in places where they end up in a competition with each other to attract conferences and congresses. This may cause issues and problems that could affect the way destinations work with the City Marketing and destination development to make themselves more competitive. In this bachelor thesis, the study focus will be on how different organizations (Visit Umeå, Folkets Hus, and partly Umeå kommun) work on place marketing, destination development, positioning and Umeå as a brand to succeed in attracting business visitors at conferences and congresses. Another important aspect of this bachelor thesis is to analyses the importance and significance of the international competition but mainly national competition that can be alleviated when the selected actors (Visit Umeå and Folkets Hus) have a synergy with each other. In order to answer the purpose of this thesis a document analysis and a literature study have been conducted, along with three different semi-structured interviews in order to gain a deeper understanding of the chosen topic. It has been shown that municipalities and places have in recent years begun to understand the importance of investing in business tourism by building conference and convention facilities, with the purpose to stimulate the local economy through business visitors. Globalization has contributed to the tough competition that places, cities, regions, countries and continents are living in, which are the main focus of this study. The question that arises from this is how Umeå’s various actors are working to promote the city and how the city of Umeå competes against the other cities who also market themselves as conference and convention cities. Keywords: Collaboration, Conferences, Congresses. Destination, Destination development, Place marketing, Visitors.