Mohammad Mehdi Kalantarzadeh - Sepidan Islamic Azad University

Cities today are increasingly becoming the principal leading roles between geographical regions. The competition between cities to establish their identifications as the best choice for prospective visitors, investors, business, students and talented people will increase as places focus on how to express their competitive significance (Dinnie, 2011). City branding is one of the strategies employed by cities which emphasize differentiation and diversification of specific places in order to gain success in such competition. This paper presents an introduction to city branding and proposes that tourism can be applied as a tool for city branding. Getting support from previous research, the paper concludes that tourism and city branding both share a couple of common goals, among which are attracting inward investment as well as more and more visitors; and therefore can help develop each other. Furthermore, since experience is an indispensable determining factor in the success of every city branding process, tourism, which brings about the best opportunity to gain such experience can be considered as a tool for city branding

place branding, city branding, tourism, image