Franz Kero

Regional Marketing and the Strategic Market Planning Approach to Attract Business and Industry Case Study: Orange County, California, USA Franz Kero

Diplomarbeit, die am 22.11.2002 erfolgreich an einer Wirtschaftsuniversität in Österreich im Fachbereich Betriebswirtschaft eingereicht wurde. Abstract: This thesis describes and evaluates how regional marketing, based on the ideas of Philip Kotler's Marketing Places (1993), can be a reasonable tool to attract business locators into economic regions. The thesis concentrates on strategic market planning of local economic development programs. It is presented how to make use of local competitive advantages by useful bundling of incentives. The notion of marketing and governing places is combined and shall offer the reader a new perspective of meeting regional economic objectives for places. This thesis is divided into two parts: a theoretical part (where industrial incentives are presented and Kotler's concept is explained and criticized) and an empirical part (where regional marketing is applied and tested for effectiveness). First, it will be defined what regional marketing is and what forms of incentives are considered. Then it will be presented how marketing strategies can be organized in a local environment, followed by a discussion how companies make location decisions. In the last chapter of the first part, a critical discussion of the regional marketing approach is presented. In the second part, an emphasis will be put on the case study; a location (Orange County, California, USA) where economic development based on marketing planning came to work. With a view to the situation and implications analyzed in the case study, it will be tried to scrutinize effectiveness and usefulness of economic development programs based on regional marketing principles for this place in question and in general. Table of Contents: |TABLE OF CONTENTS|0 1.|INTRODUCTION|2 1.1|Delineation of the problem|3 1.2|Marketing as a regional development approach|4 1.3|Methodology|6 1.4|Objectives and structure of the master's thesis|6 1.5