Introduction
In the context of international investment promotion, "city branding" has long been considered a game exclusive to major metropolises. High communication budgets, mature city images, and well-established international marketing networks—these all seem to favor New York, Singapore, or Shenzhen. However, small and medium-sized cities have not given up the competition for attention. A recent academic study in Magetan Regency, Indonesia, offers a rare window of observation: building a city brand through cultural narratives can still create a recognizable local identity even with limited financial resources. This is not only about tourism, but also about investors' judgment of whether a city "has stable social values, clear development intentions, and a trustworthy environment."
1. Why Is Traditional Investment Promotion Communication Failing?
The default assumption of traditional investment promotion communication is that investors are rational and their behavior is predictable; it is enough to list resources, taxes, labor costs, and incentive policies to persuade them. But the real situation is much more complex. When more and more cities offer the same preferential terms, policy advantages become a "necessary condition" rather than a "reason for choice." Investors face information overload, and decision-making requires saving cognitive costs. At this point, whether a city can provide emotional certainty often affects whether it enters the candidate list.
Another common mistake made by small cities is to confuse "brand" with "appearance." Replacing a logo, shooting a promotional video, and issuing a city slogan are considered the completion of brand building. What they fail to realize is that without the support of endogenous stories, these visual elements can only exist briefly in the market. Both international research and practice show that the essence of a local brand is a "negotiated consensus"—only when citizens, businesses, and local institutions all identify with the narrative can the brand be genuinely conveyed.
2. Differentiated Narratives for Small and Medium-Sized Cities: Insights from Magetan Regency
Magetan Regency is located on the border of East Java Province, on the slopes of Mount Lawu, and is a predominantly agricultural area. Although it has a high-visitation destination such as Lake Sarangan, visitor numbers at other attractions vary greatly, indicating that the city's potential has not been evenly recognized—a situation highly similar to that of many counties and districts in China and Southeast Asia. To boost regional competitiveness, the local government did not simply hire an advertising agency. Instead, through focus group discussions with cross-sector stakeholders and analysis of regional planning documents and promotional materials, it explored how to use "cultural narratives" to form a unified identity.The most striking part of the study is the application of the theoretical framework. The researchers used Anholt’s city-brand hexagon to analyze brand equity in small and medium-sized cities. The framework covers six dimensions: presence, place, potential, people, pulse, and prerequisites. Through this approach, the Magetan Regency brand did not rely merely on a slogan but sought a balance among nature, culture, history, and institutional safeguards. In the end, the brand name “Magetan Ngangeni” and its logo—featuring Mount Lawu, the Lawu starling, a kris dagger, and lake-and-waterfall motifs—were essentially an attempt to translate scattered local elements into a coherent set of answers to “Where am I?” and “Why am I different?”
The implications of this case for investment promotion are clear. When a city cannot compete with metropolises in industrial scale, it can use its story to screen for investments that fit its culture. For example, if a traditional agricultural county weaves rural life experiences, food craftsmanship, and natural landscapes into an appealing cultural narrative, it is more likely to attract not only tourism operators but also investment in agricultural technology, branded foods, the healing economy, and educational study tours. Narrative here is not decoration; it is a screening mechanism.
More importantly, the study shows that a “culture-story city brand” is more than a promotional mechanism. It generates three hidden benefits: first, it negotiates place identity, helping residents locate themselves amid change and continuity; second, it fosters stakeholder co-creation, giving government, businesses, and the community a single narrative line to share; and third, it enhances long-term competitiveness—because stories are not easily copied elsewhere.
III. A Six-Step Framework from Cultural Story to Investment Narrative
The value of the Magetan case lies not in mechanical replication, but in providing a methodological path that can be adapted to different regions. Drawing on existing experience from multiple places, we suggest that investment promotion agencies work through the following six steps.
Step one: inventory cultural assets. “Culture” here is not just traditional song and dance or historical sites. It also includes local ecological worldviews, industrial history, craftsmanship techniques, folk rituals, and proverbs in local dialects. Small and medium-sized cities are often so immersed in their everyday culture that they take it for granted; they need outside perspectives to help distill it.
Step two: organize multi-stakeholder narrative workshops. Following the FGD (focus group discussion) model used in the study, invite government, business, cultural workers, and community residents to discuss together, “Who exactly is this city?” The aim is not to unify opinions, but to listen to sentiments that cannot be captured by statistical indicators.
Step three: use the hexagon to identify gaps. Bring investment promotion goals into the Anholt framework and compare them with the current situation. If a city finds that it scores low on external visibility but has strengths in quality of life, its communication strategy should not imitate the big events of large cities; instead, it should focus on long-term, in-depth reporting.Step 4: Establish a "semantically stable" narrative system. Slogans and logos are only the final output; what truly matters is building a core story that all materials repeatedly use. It must have concrete characters, conflict, destination, and time. For example, "we went from farmland to technology" is more compelling than "we provide opportunities for you."
Step 5: Embed the narrative into the investment journey. A city brand is more than brochures. From airport reception to park tours to face-to-face meetings with local entrepreneurs, every step can reinforce the story. What potential investors care about most is not what the city says, but how consistently the city repeats the same story.
Step 6: Use cultural data to monitor identity shifts. Periodically revisit keywords, citation rates, and the volume of local residents' secondary creations of the city story on social media, to judge whether the brand is growing organically.
Among these six steps, the most common mistake is "skipping Step 2" and directly letting an outside design company ghostwrite. The result is often a beautiful design document that does not belong to the local place. More dangerously, when investors ask local taxi drivers or ordinary residents to verify the city's vision and they look bewildered, the impression previously built immediately collapses.
IV. Future Directions: Cultural Narrative Enters a New Digital and Geopolitical Context
Cultural-narrative-driven communication is being reshaped by three forces. The first is the mass production of content brought by artificial intelligence. Today, almost every city can generate a hundred video scripts within a few days. This technological convenience has inflated "standard discourse" to an extreme, making original local voices the scarce resource instead. Investment promotion agencies should conduct archiving, oral history, and on-the-ground content documentation more systematically, and must not be dominated in reverse by the "plausible-looking" local narratives auto-generated by AI models.
The second shift comes from investor behavior. A new generation of entrepreneur-founders cares more about integrating life and work; they no longer pursue only the largest markets, but pay attention to climate, community, and identity. This helps small and medium-sized cities turn forests, snow mountains, or alleyways into concrete investment attractions.
The third is the growing sensitivity of geopolitics. Small and medium-sized cities that once enthusiastically pursued an "international" brand now need cultural narratives to explain their uniqueness and their connection to the world. For example, cities with a history of ancient roads or ports can build memory narratives around "passage, transit, and exchange," conveying signals of openness and stability.
At present, many counties, cities, and districts in China are advancing "one city, one policy." How to give communication strategies the feature of "one city, one story" is a new challenge for investment promotion practitioners. The Magdan study offers an important reminder: a city investment brand that truly lasts is not determined by brochures, but jointly by whether residents can tell you the story of the city and whether investors are willing to embed their own future into that story.