This paper aims to critically discuss the place-marketing strategy that has been widely seen as an alternative way of regional development for the last decade in South Korea. In particular, it argues that the place-marketing strategy is highly likely to intensify the inter-local or inter-urban completion and to result in the territorialization of places because it is based on the essentialist notion of place that has been suggested by the humanistic geographers. In order to logically support my argument, I will critically review the essentialist notion of place, and introduce an alternative notion of place, in which the place is seen as socially constructed through complicated power relations and social, political and cultural processes. Also, I will logically demonstrate that the place-marketing can be seen as a strategy for territorializing places by discussing how territory is socially and politically constructed as a particular form of place.