The chapter provides a road map for the exploration of the ‘creative city’ as a conceptual construct, a normative ideal and a set of policy practices. It takes as a starting point the concept of city marketing and the economic and political changes that brought about the application to cities of marketing and branding theories. It discusses the concept of branding, in the corporate world and as applied to cities, showing the relation between branding and a new orientation in urban policy-making that serves as the framework within which branding activities take place. It is argued that branding activities are constructed on the basis of a selective interpretation of two different bodies of literature and are integrated into two different sets of urban policies, each with its own tensions and internal contradictions. In the final section a number of problems related to the evaluation of branding are presented.