This paper promotes a theoretical discussion on the applicability of city marketing techniques when place marketing a rural area. The discussion focuses on the preconditions for successful place marketing in both cities and rural areas, illustrating how place marketing needs to be applied to be successful.The findings suggest that rural areas differ from cities and metropolitan areas –in terms of e.g. population, resources, vulnerability and resilience –thus making it difficult to essentially ‘copy-paste’ city marketing strategies and techniques onto rural areas. Place marketing has however become a lucrative area for private sector consultants uninterested in the time-consuming gathering of empirical evidence because their business model is based on reusing the same product.This paper offers important insights on the importance of theory when conducting place marketing; theorising successes and failures in place marketing could actually increase the efficiency of place marketing activities. For rural areas this could stimulate regional development.