A brand for Frankfurt. Really?

“How Frankfurt Wants to Become a Brand.” Daniel Schleidt’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 14 February 2026 does not offer much beyond the predictable. When 500 marketing experts gather in Frankfurt am Main for the German Marketing Congress and – more or less dutifully – speak about the host city, one sentence can reliably be heard these days: “We have to become a brand.” Not least because, supposedly, everyone else is doing it better. Which, on closer inspection, can hardly be true, since virtually every city claims that the others are ahead of it.

The rest follows a familiar script – at least as a rule, though there may well be exceptions. A branding project is launched, a positioning developed, a brand core defined, a guiding idea formulated, a new visual identity presented, and finally a campaign rolled out. The procedure follows the well-known logic of the corporate world: what works for soap, cars, or insurance should also work for cities. Conceptually, this is appealing, intellectually manageable, organizationally convenient – and for precisely that reason problematic. For the transfer of business branding routines to urban communities tends to overlook their political, social, and cultural complexity. What remains largely ignored is the specific nature of the city as a brand: its polyphony, its lack of clear ownership, its contradictions, and its character as a space of public negotiation.

It should be obvious: a city is not a product. It is not primarily subject to economic market logic; it has no owner, no marketing board that can definitively determine its identity and tone of voice. Who would be the brand owner of Frankfurt? The city government? The business community? The cultural sector? The real estate industry? Or ultimately everyone and no one? Who sits at the table when the brand core is defined?

A concise positioning always means selection – and selection means exclusion. Brand logic aims at condensation, simplification, and recognizability; it reduces complexity in order to create orientation. That is precisely its strength – and its problem. Whatever does not fit into the condensed image falls away. Whoever does not appear brand-conform becomes marginal. This is not merely an empirical observation but a political decision with tangible consequences.

For precisely this reason, the craft of city governance must reflect this structural tendency toward narrowing. If urbanity thrives on density, encounter, and openness, then this implies a mandate: to create spaces in which difference is not merely tolerated but made productive. A city becomes attractive not by homogenizing itself, but by organizing diversity – in its neighborhoods, its institutions, its public debates.

Attractiveness does not arise solely from beautiful squares or economic dynamism. It grows out of the experience that different life plans can coexist without displacing one another. A city gains appeal when it enables social mobility, permits cultural experimentation, opens educational opportunities, and ensures mobility – both literal and metaphorical. In this interplay of infrastructure, social balance, and cultural openness, urbanity becomes a political task.

Cities consist of contradictions, milieus, fractures, parallel worlds. They are never harmonious, never unambiguous. Next to the renovated Gründerzeit quarter lies the large housing estate; next to the start-up hub, traditional crafts; next to the theater, the youth center. Different social positions, cultural imprints, and biographical experiences condense in a confined space. It is precisely this simultaneity of the non-simultaneous that constitutes the urban.

Cities live from diversity, not from uniformity. Diversity entails friction, negotiation, sometimes conflict. Urban politics therefore does not mean dissolving oppositions but enduring and productively moderating them. It means building bridges between milieus, securing participation, and protecting public spaces in which encounter remains possible. Where this succeeds, an urban culture emerges that understands difference not as a threat but as a resource – and therein lies the city’s true strength.

Moreover, a city is communicated by an unmanageable number of actors across equally unmanageable channels: from television crime dramas to novels, from Instagram feeds to bank annual reports, from start-up conferences to the fan curve of Eintracht. These voices cannot be orchestrated. Who could impose a common line upon them? And even if someone tried: by what means? Classical brand management presupposes steerability and coherence. The city, however, is an open system, a resonance chamber, a site of permanent production of meaning – contradictory, idiosyncratic, dynamic.

Frankfurt’s particular “problem” lies elsewhere. Frankfurt does not first need to become a brand – it already is one, and one with global reach. Hardly any other German city is positioned so clearly worldwide: as an international banking center, as the seat of major institutions, as a major international airport for travelers of all classes. The skyline is iconic, the financial center globally present, the airport a central hub between continents.

This image is clear, recognizable, and economically effective. Yet the brand image is not only strong –  it is powerful. It is sustained and stabilized by influential actors: globally operating financial institutions, real estate and infrastructure interests, strategic location policies. Whoever shapes this brand simultaneously influences investment decisions, land use, and political priorities – in other words, the concrete form of the city.

The international attribution follows a remarkably stable pattern of interpretation. In global discourse, Frankfurt appears as a city of functions: financial center, central bank location, transfer hub in global air traffic. The city is described as infrastructure rather than as a lived environment, as a system rather than as a contradictory urban fabric with its scenes, ruptures, and zones of friction.

When cultural dynamics, nightlife, or the equally troubled and vibrant Bahnhofsviertel are mentioned, it is often in a tone of surprise – as a deviation from what is expected. The milieu-like, the unruly, the socially and culturally ambivalent must be explicitly marked because it does not fit the dominant image. It appears as a contrast to the functional city, not as an integral part of it.

Thus the international brand image is clearly defined: Frankfurt stands for banks, airport, and functionality. Everything else – the cultural scene as much as the notorious areas of the city – is narrated as an addition. Not as a self-evident component of urban identity, but as an irritating or decorative supplement to a city understood, at its core, in technocratic terms.

And this brand works. It is strong, clear, recognizable. Only: it is not necessarily popular. Impressive, but not inviting. Powerful, but not lovable. Efficient, but cool. It is precisely here that the local debate takes issue. Many experts, stakeholders, and politicians feel uneasy with this image. They would prefer a different narrative: more cultural, more creative, more sustainable, more livable – in short, warmer. Yet this brand is not only powerful; it is also established and internationally anchored. It feeds on real structures, economic functions, and attributions that have grown over decades. And therein lies the difficulty: one cannot simply affix a new label without changing the underlying realities that have produced and continue to reproduce it.

From a communications perspective, the following applies: if an offering is unknown, a cognitive gap arises. People are willing to close that gap. They listen, they are open to information, they are receptive to targeted communication. Attention is possible because orientation is lacking. Communication has a genuine opportunity to place interpretative offers.

If, however, an offering is already known – even if the senders regard the prevailing image as truncated or distorted – there is initially no reason for recipients to engage with it anew. The image exists, categorized, stored. It produces no impulse to search, no inner contradiction that demands clarification. Whoever seeks to correct such an image is fighting against an already consolidated perception. Targeted communication efforts then either come to nothing or only achieve noticeable effects after long, intensive, and consistent exertion.

Here lies the core of Frankfurt’s debate. It is not about developing a new brand. It is about repositioning an existing, extremely robust one. And that is far more demanding. Millions of people at home and abroad hold a consolidated image of Frankfurt: banks, skyline, airport, internationality, speed, money. Why should they revise this image? On what basis? Through which personal experience that contradicts their previous impression?

Structural reality speaks a clear language. More than 60 million people come into contact with Frankfurt Airport each year, roughly half of them in transit. For them, Frankfurt is transit, not destination – a functional stopover in the global transport network. Added to this is the international financial sector as a visible center of power with its high-rises, institutions, and symbols. These two factors generate a communicative force against which any image campaign fades. The necessary communicative counterweight does not exist. And even if it did: who would embody it? An abstract “Frankfurt”? The city government? A loose coalition of local actors? Well-meaning and rhetorically skilled marketing professionals?

Anyone who speaks of city branding should – as in sophisticated corporate brand management – not think first of brand communication. Brands do not arise from campaigns but from real performance, from verifiable change, from experienced difference. If Frankfurt wants to be perceived differently, it must act differently: in housing policy, in the design of public spaces, in questions of social integration, in balancing the financial center with urban society, in connecting international functions with local quality of life. Only when reality changes can the narrative change.

And this narrative will not be disseminated by a central marketing office, but by the many, often uncoordinated ambassadors of the city – companies, cultural producers, media, visitors, residents. The repositioning of an existing city brand therefore cannot be reduced to slicker communication, a new slogan, or a refreshed corporate design. It requires real transformation. That may well be asking too much of most professional brand-makers.