The Invisible Benchmark
Quiet excellence: A gift and a challenge
In City Brand Barometer 2025, Zurich ranks among the world’s leaders in quality, safety and liveability…yet slips in the overall ranking. Why? Because a great offer alone isn’t enough to build a successful brand. A great city must also be seen and felt.
ZRHTop ten in the Quality of Life Index
A city worth discovering
Zurich’s Delivery is excellent. It offers one of the highest standards of living anywhere, but rarely features on travel wishlists. This is an opportunity to build presence.
From its punctual transport to its intuitive digital systems, everything works with near-effortless precision. The city is built to function, not impress. For travellers who value calm over chaos, that’s a rare and powerful advantage.
Calm, collected…invisible?
Meanwhile, Zurich’s Promise tells a different story. Search interest and brand presence lag behind European peers, revealing an image that feels too reserved for today’s visually-driven world. Zurich’s restraint may be what keeps it from standing out.
Zurich doesn’t need to be louder. It needs to make its silence heard.
What's next?
Zurich has an opportunity to reframe its brand as ‘City as Sanctuary’: a place of quiet excellence where everything works so visitors can truly rest. In an age of noisy travel, serenity could be its strongest story.
Want to discover more?
With even more information and insights, it’s a whole lot more than pretty graphs (but plenty of those, too.)
Download the full reportRelated work from Saffron
Apart from investigating city brands, we make brands memorable across strategy, design and product.
