Creating promotional Baltic Sea Region products for tourists, talents and investors in the global markets – the BaltMet Promo project ended in the end of 2011
BaltMet Promo – Creating promotional Baltic Sea Region products for tourists, talents and investors in the global markets was based on the cooperation of Baltic Metropoles Network (BaltMet formed by 11 major cities in the Baltic Sea Region) and Baltic Development Forum.
The BaltMet Promo project aimed to join forces in promoting the Baltic Sea Region on a global scale. The project wanted to attract tourists from other continents, talents from the creative sector as well as major international investment projects to the Baltic Sea Region.
Overall aims were:
- Create a dynamic transnational and multi-sectoral marketing community to attract tourists, talents, and investors to Baltic Sea Region,
- Map the various branding initiatives in Baltic Sea Region,
- Strengthen the common Baltic Sea Region identity at home and abroad and
- Establish a collaborative regional method for creation of new Baltic Sea Region products which are transferable to other geographic and thematic areas.
If you want more information about BaltMet Promo please consult the project website www.baltmetpromo.net.
Baltic Development Forum’s role in BaltMet Promo
BDF’s specific role in the BaltMet Promo project was to facilitate a public affairs and policy dialogue function, and to secure political and other support for the project. This was achieved by bringing policy recommendations from the project and the discussion on regional identity and branding to the policy maker’s level, as well as by positioning the Project in relation to relevant policy areas in the region and the EU. The concrete output of this was a Policy Action Plan directed at policy makers in the BSR, with suggestions on how to create policies that ensure good conditions for marketing the region globally. We also tried to ensure that the different initiatives support and reinforce each other.
To this end, a series of “policy roundtables” were organised, where decision makers from national ministries, investment and tourism promotion agencies, national cultural institutions, city governments, pan-Baltic organisations and EU projects met and discussed issues related to the promotion and branding of the Baltic Sea Region and its countries, regions and cities.
The aim of the Policy Roundtable was to facilitate a policy dialogue on issues related to the promotion and branding of, and identity-building in, the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and its countries, regions and cities. The overall objectives were to shape policy recommendations, identify complementarities, create synergies and promote a closer collaboration between the different actors and efforts promoting the region. The Policy Roundtable were also serving the purpose of coordinating those efforts of the EU Strategy for the BSR that were relevant for reaching the ambitions set out in the horizontal priority “regional identity building” in the EU Strategy for the BSR. Furthermore, the Policy Roundtable, functioned as a link between the BaltMet Promo project and other relevant actors, projects and efforts in the region. It was a channel through which the results of the project could be made known to a wider audience, on the one hand, and the results of the discussions at the Policy Roundtable could bring valuable input to the project, on the other hand.
Baltic Development Forum was also in charge of publishing the report “Place branding and place promotion efforts in the Baltic Sea Region – A Situation Analysis“. The report maps existing organisations, networks, projects and activities that are geared towards marketing the Baltic Sea Region, or considerable parts of it. The overall objective is to promote synergy and coordination between different initiatives and organisations and to facilitate a wider discussion on the international branding and attractiveness of the Baltic Sea Region. It also puts forward a number of recommendations for the future marketing of the region.
After the BaltMet Promo project ended in December 2011 several of the project partners including Baltic Development Forum and the lead partner City of Helsinki continue their efforts to enhance common BSR promotional efforts in the interreg-project One BSR. Read more about One BSR here.
