Project

How will megatrends impact the appeal of Zurich as a business location?

To what extent will megatrends have an impact the appeal of Zurich as a business location? EBP analyzed the relevant future trends and arrived at a list of requirements for securing effective location marketing and Zurich’s status as an attractive place to do business.

Greater Zurich Area AG (GZA) will be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019. In addition to reviewing milestones the enterprise has reached throughout the years, GZA would like to mark the occasion by venturing a look into the future together with the Zurich Chamber of Commerce (ZHK). The company has therefore undertaken to examine future trends, including megatrends, which can be thought of as powerful, transformative forces with the potential to change the global economy, business and society. The aim here is to identify effective forms of location marketing that promise to take account of such developments and that can secure Zurich’s status as an appealing business location.

A look into the future

The EBP team conducted an extensive examination of the relevant literature in order to compile a list of major trends, before then going on to categorize the trends and select those that seemed to be especially relevant to metropolitan Zurich. What impact will the megatrends have on enterprises and their location requirements? What will their impact be on the various locations within metropolitan Zurich? These questions were discussed by GZA and ZHK representatives in the context of two seminars. In its capacity as an external consultant, the EBP team drafted a set of criteria that location-marketing initiatives will need to meet to ensure their effectiveness into the future, as well as a set of criteria that will need to be met to ensure the future appeal of business locations.

Treiber der künftigen Entwicklung
Drivers of future development

Location marketing 2039

The look into the future was also the focus of an anniversary event organized by GZA on August 27, 2019 at the ETH Campus in Hönggerberg. At the event, business leaders, politicians, scientists and other stakeholders discussed their views of the next twenty years of location marketing and the future of metropolitan Zurich as a business and technology hub. In a presentation on megatrends and their consequences for location marketing, EBP took the audience on a journey through time as it presented six main conclusions for future-ready location marketing.

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