The continuous of the existence of countries, just like commercial enterprises; depends on their financial, economic and social powers and its ability to protect them. Therefore, countries can be considered as complex enterprises with financial and human resources. With the image of a correctly managed nation, commercial institutions and products might be able to gain a competitive advantage in the world market. Therefore, local governments make large amounts of investment to differentiate their cities from others. This research aims to examine the academic studies performed in place branding in terms of publication years, the places of applied, the factors of branding, the methodologies, sample groups and their sizes and to determine the direction of the place branding tendencies by performing descriptive analysis in terms of the resulting situations. In this study, articles containing the subject of place branding, published in refereed journals indexing by SOBIAD Citation Index, were subjected to descriptive analysis. The study shows that many cities in Turkey have been studied for city branding. However, these studies have similar characteristics. Another important result is that the studies generally describe the existing state of the cities and do not suggest a model for branding.