This is a book that centers on cities and companies. Cities need to grow and prosper. Companies also need to grow and prosper. It turns out that the fortunes of the two entities—cities and companies—are intimately interconnected.

How? A city needs to develop not only an attractive social life but also a strong economic life and future. Much has been written about the social life of cities, but much less has been written about their economic life. A city's economic life depends on its ability to attract and nurture small businesses, medium-size businesses, and large domestic corporations and multinational companies (MNCs). This book focuses on the attraction of MNCs. These businesses carry out research, investment, production, distribution, and sales that drive the city's economy. Cities have gross domestic products (GDPs), just as nations do. We can measure how much GDP a particular city generates. The GDP provides a picture of jobs and household, business, per capita, and median income—all good measures of a city's “economic” condition.

We can also talk about the rate of growth of a city's GDP. If GDP growth is strong, the city is generating new jobs and its citizens prosper. If GDP growth is low, zero, or even negative, the city is barely surviving. Many top cities are falling behind or even failing—such as Detroit and Flint in Michigan; Cleveland, Dayton, and Youngstown in Ohio; and Stockton and Riverside in California—because they stopped being attractive to business. This is a concern to the city's businesspeople, to its jobholders and job seekers, to its politicians, and to its citizens.

Companies are making decisions all the time on where to invest, where to produce their goods and services, and where to sell them. Companies that are growing have to find new locations and choose them carefully. Companies also must periodically reassess the locations of their current economic activities because locations change in their desirability. Many domestic-based companies are facing new competitors who come in with lower prices, better quality, or both, all because of the opening of trade around the world and the facilitation of trade made possible by advances in technology. Domestic companies can't stand still. They have to defend themselves, and they have to move to new, promising locations where opportunities are growing.

Many companies have moved their manufacturing from developed countries to developing countries in their search for lower costs. In doing this, these companies had to evaluate which cities and locations are the best. If French car manufacturer Peugeot wants to expand in the Asian market, where should it establish its new management and production branches? It already has a joint production venture with Dongfeng, based in Wuhan. Should it strengthen its production presence in East China's top cities, such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Guangzhou? Peugeot assembles in Bangkok, but should it produce there, as it does in Indonesia?

The economic standing of different cities and metropolitan areas is of primary concern to business leaders and managers, who have to know how much product they can sell locally and trade outwardly, how much they should invest, and where they should invest for the growth of their enterprise. Economic standing is also of primary concern to politicians, who need business growth to generate city revenue to pay the bills they incur and to provide jobs for their citizens.

Successful business owners and managers have to know all dimensions of a city's life: the land and housing costs, the city's amenities and features, the direction in which the city is going in the next 10 or 20 years. Companies need to know who, what, when, where, why, and how buyers purchase goods and services. They have to know the laws and the ease of establishing businesses and trading and exporting goods.

The politicians in a city have to understand what different companies require from a city to operate successfully. Not every company has an interest in a particular city. Every city has to determine its main attractions and which industries, as well as which companies in those industries, can find the city's resources and ambitions a good fit. Politicians need the skills to attract the right businesses to their city and thus generate enough prosperity to pay the city's bills, create jobs for its citizens, and get themselves reelected or reappointed.

Citizens generally know little about the economy of their city. They are concerned with jobs, family, friends, neighbors, and personal pleasures. Scholars and thought leaders have neglected the study of the economy of cities because they thought the key to economic development lay in the policies of nations, not those of cities.

In the last three decades, matters have changed. National governments have pursued a regime of global free trade. Capital investment, consumption, and trade have crossed national borders. Companies in the developed world have moved from thinking exclusively about domestic production and consumption to shifting their manufacturing to the East. This has allowed them to reduce their costs and to fine-tune their marketing and financial strategies so that they engineer high demand for their brands throughout the world and thus achieve maximum market share and profits.

Meanwhile, the developing world has continued to learn how to make money by making things. Developing countries have been learning how to market their goods and services. There has been a great increase in the number of MNCs coming out of the developing world, and arising MNCs from the East are posing strong competitive threats to the long-dominant MNCs of the West.

Rural people have continued to migrate in growing numbers from farms into large cities. Great industrial cities, such as São Paulo and Jakarta, have grown in the developing world, becoming megacities. Large cities of up to 5 million people and megacities of more than 10 million people have begun to dominate the GDP of nations. In the developing world, massive industrial production has filled old and new cities with rural populations. Developing countries have absorbed investment for infrastructure, manufacturing, natural resources, and trade. They have rapidly urbanized their populations as a vast labor force and developed an indigenous middle class for consumption and a wealthy upper class for investment.

At the same time, great commercial centers in the developed world—such as New York, London, Paris, Stuttgart, Milan, and Tokyo—have sustained their wealth by attracting domestic and global talent and investment for a new mix of industries and creative media.

The massive change of urban market scale has induced the merger of domestic companies to consolidate into massive MNCs, which have come to dominate national GDPs and the gross world product (GWP). By 2010, 8,000 companies around the world generated 90 percent of the GWP. Six hundred cities yielded 50 percent of the GWP. Of these, only 100 cities yielded 38 percent of the GWP. Trend projections only advance this concentration at both ends of the exchange between companies and cities.

From an economic point of view, we are living in a world of MNCs and global cities. Companies and cities have overwhelmed the economic force of nations. Companies and cities constitute the platform of investment decisions by business leaders and marketers and are the major concern of political leaders, who must position their cities in this trend.

Small businesses play an important role in job creation and economic growth but a smaller role in generating economic value. They play an important role in the political and social life of a country but a smaller role in its economic life. Most successful small businesses are absorbed by MNCs.

What happened to the economic development role of the nation-state? Developed nations spent their energy advancing the level of public welfare with deficit spending. They pursued political programs and trade integration and engaged in regional wars. They promoted a marketing and financial system to drive consumption. As sovereign powers, they spent more time planning their relations abroad than they did at home. They let both the real economy and their cities take care of themselves.

The legacy of the West's great wealth and power masked the tectonic shifts in the global economy toward the East until the financial crisis of 2008. That crisis knocked the socks off of the overleveraged developed world and slowed the growth rate of the developing world. Central governments and their central banks provided meager economic stimulus, some by courting self-destructive austerity programs, but they primarily used their energy to save their top banks with cheap money in the hope of restoring a flow of credit for economic stimulus. This did not occur.

While nations were saving their banks, their cities were on their own to repair their economies with expensive bond money, and large companies were on their own to reap the profit of cheap money. Global cities competed with one another to attract MNC investment. Companies used their cash for investment to grow their brands in the developing world, which, unlike the West, was far from saturating its demand.

So we come to the setting for this book. The destiny of the economic world today is in the hands of the interplay between global MNCs and global cities. Our purpose is to assist business leaders to pick the right places for investments in the best global-growth cities and to assist marketing managers to intensify their marketing campaigns to reap the harvest of these investments. Our corollary purpose is to help the political and civic leaders of global cities to attract global MNCs that are choosing among many competing cities. We give some attention to the role that national governments can play to facilitate the economic growth of their top city regions by attracting suitable MNC investment.

Chapter 1 illuminates the economic power of global cities. Chapter 2 examines what cities are doing to maximize their market power. Chapter 3 reveals the immense economic power of MNCs. Chapter 4 investigates how MNCs select new cities for market expansion. Chapter 5 discusses what cities can do to win the competition for MNC investment. Chapter 6 considers how national governments can assist their top cities to grow economically. Chapter 7 examines the social and moral responsibilities of MNCs and cities in the brutal game of economic competition. Finally, Chapter 8 assists marketing managers to strategically and tactically optimize value for their companies in a world of global city markets.

We present a lot of data and case examples to put flesh on the bones of a proposition that the future of marketing depends on how effectively business marketers use the resources of their large companies to win share and profits in the ever-narrowing sphere of concentrated urban global markets. We also explain how city marketers can use the strengths of their cities in the competition to successfully attract global MNC investment for employment, higher income, public revenue, and civil prosperity.

There is nothing permanent in the landscape of an economy. Change occurs all the time. But we can say with confidence that for the next two decades, the global market economy will rest on the interplay of MNCs and large city regions.