Sports and cultural events can often be a huge success factor in a Destination Marketing programme. Just look at the Montreux Jazz Festival or the Cannes Film Festival. Such events are big drivers and brand builders for those destinations. Look at some of the worlds great Place Brands such as Liverpool, Manchester, San Francisco, Barcelona and New York and they have often become synonymous with certain sports and teams. Stockholm badly needs a great sports team. If you were to ask a random sample of a thousand people around the world to name a great Stockholm football club, I’d be surprised if 1% could even name one. Stockholm does have three pretty average football teams, AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby. The best advice, from a destination viewpoint, would be to merge them into one decent club and re-name it Stockholm United (I guess this would cause a dilemma for the the supporters as they would have to be called something along the lines of the black and blue army with a green bit). Stockholm does have one of the world’s absolute premier cultural events, The Nobel Prizes. However the event suffers from a well known Swedish trait of being overly modest and as a result the prize is vastly under-leveraged as an event. The Nobel Committee are very rightly concerned about not over exploiting the prize, but they could certainly make more of this great event. Alfred himself was quite a marketeer. Read any of the world’s main newspapers or websites on the day after the awards have been given out, and there will be little, if any, coverage. It’s a huge opportunity to position and promote Stockholm that is sadly missed. Julian Stubbs will be covering this subject as a guest speaker at the Professionell Idrott Event Day being held at Nalen on October 8th, 2012. The event is arranged by Sport & Affärer in collaboration with Stockholms Stad.