The increased global connectivity and mobility of both humans and capital has created competition between municipalities in attracting the resources needed to achieve their developmental goals. A call for papers focusing on reputation and brand management in Scandinavian municipalities has been announced. Today, it is absolutely necessary to be an attractive place and municipality, and brand management can be a tool in both achieving and communicating this. For branding to be effective, it is critical to have a good understanding of the branding context, and this conceptual paper explores the branding context for municipalities by analysing it—firstly, based on a product-oriented paradigm and, secondly, on service-based logics. It is argued that much of current place management and place branding research rests on belief in the product-oriented paradigm and thus focuses largely on the provider. In contrast, using service-based logics as a starting point places value creation at the center and shifts the focus to the resident. This has several theoretical and methodological consequences as well as practical implications for Scandinavian municipalities, and these will be discussed in the paper.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the municipality in the place marketing context and to describe how municipalities work on making their place good to live in. The study rests on abductive reasoning whereby service-based logic forms the study and offers a theoretical framework for how to approach the phenomena.

Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative study in the form of 20 semi-structured interviews with leading elected officials and civil servants is used to let us understand how two typical municipalities in southern Sweden work on making their municipality a good place for their residents to live in. Content analysis is used to analyze the data.

Findings – The study reveals how municipalities work on creating opportunities for interactions between themselves and their residents, as well as offers insight into what value propositions the municipalities believe they offer their residents. The current study shows that the geographical location and the natural environment, basic and essential services, accommodations, urban quality, recreation and leisure and ambience constitute important dimensions in the place offering.

Originality/value – Service-based logic is used as a backdrop to facilitate the analysis in this study, which emphasizes value propositions offered by the municipality and interactions between the municipality and its residents, which increase our understanding of how municipalities work on making their place good to live in. The service-based logic help shed new light on the place marketing context and allows us to understand the context in a new way.

Purpose – Using service-based logic as its theoretical lens, this study aims to approach residents’ place satisfaction in a novel way. The purpose is to explore residents’ perception of the place in which they live and to shed new light on their place satisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on explorative qualitative focus group research. Data were collected in two typical municipalities in southern Sweden. The sampling procedure was purposive, resulting in six focus groups, consisting of a total of 33 residents. The empirical material was transcribed and analyzed using a structured content analysis inspired by grounded theory.

Findings – A model for understanding residents’ perceptions of what constitutes a good place to live is introduced. The model shows that many value propositions are produced in the provider sphere, independent of the user, for example by the municipality or the business sector. Other value propositions are co-created in a joint sphere, meaning that the user is actively involved in the production of these value propositions. The resident then uses different value propositions to create value-in-use in the resident sphere, independent of theprovider, and to co-create value-in-use in the joint sphere.

Originality/value – The study creates a bridge between the stream of research on place satisfaction andstudies that take stakeholders and co-creation into consideration; it shifts from the prevalent provider perspective on place branding and static place attributes to a focus on the relationship between users and providers.

Stakeholder co-creation is of key strategic importance and a topical issue within both place marketing and public governance. However, co-creation is a wide concept and there is a need to further the understanding of the roles of stakeholders and the specific activities in co-creation. Inspired by the place marketing field, the context of this study is the place. Thus, a contribution is made to public governance by a change in focus. Furthermore, a model grounded in empirical work is created which helps us to understand different activities that take place in the co-creation of a place to live. Six important activities in place co-creation are identified: handling, enabling, operating, social networking, supporting and representing.