摘要: Place marketing and branding have received much attention both in literature and in practice especially in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the research literature of place branding related to the dynamic evolution of knowledge-intensive regions is limited. This paper aims at providing an analysis of place branding processes in knowledge-intensive regions in relation to the evolution of their high tech clusters, in an attempt to identify the relation between brand development and cluster performance from a longitudinal perspective. The paper discusses the results of a multiple case study including Pisa, Italy and Oulu, Finland. The findings suggest that, in these two cases, branding has consisted more of labeling an existing economic phenomenon rather than of fostering or having a bet on it in a visionary way. This is related to the political nature of branding which may provoke a mismatch between the timing of the high …