This dissertation brings a critical ethnographic lens to bear on the ideologies and practices of place branding as they unfolded in Eastern France in the mid-2010s. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I unpack the semiotic production of place-as-product as well as branding’s role as an entrenched facet of contemporary governance. In most cases, branding a place—whether a city, region, or nation—involves much more than an advertising campaign. Rather, place branding mobilizes broader “politics of attractiveness” in which positive representations of a place are circulated among external audiences to draw foreign investment and other forms of capital, while internally circulated brand narratives aim to motivate an entrepreneurial citizenry. I engage literature on commodification, language materiality, and neoliberal governmentality to understand various aspects of branding and what it means to live in a branded place. Chapter 3 addresses both the quantitative and qualitative production of authorized brand discourses that come to focus on the creation of a brand identity. Chapter 4 investigates efforts to cultivate affective ambassador publics who “live the brand” in ways that pair feelings of local belonging with economic action. In Chapter 5, I examine place branding knowledge and expertise through an ethnographic account of professional conferences, where disciplinary innovations and best practices are debated. This dissertation joins previous research in considering brands as fragile and fallible processes, and as only one of many ways that people “make place.” Thus, this dissertation explores regional branding in Alsace, France, as just one contemporary intervention in a long history of debates over Alsatian nationality, language, and identity. Chapter 2 explores this regional and European history through the lens of semiotic differentiation, whereby the Alsatian identity is both constructed by and constructive of broader European national ideologies. Chapter 6 examines the local effects of brand ideologies in the renaming of the Alsace region itself as part of a broader regional reform. Approached ethnographically, place brands begin to appear as contingent projects in time, rather than as things in the world (Graan 2016, S82), and the diverse motivations for engaging in (or ignoring) brand discourses and materialities begin to surface.