Does entrepreneur perception of the city’s decline matter to place attachment?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between local entrepreneurs’ perception of the city’s decline and their place attachment (measured in terms of commitment to the declining city and sense of how the declining city compares to other cities). Design/methodology/approach The authors surveyed entrepreneurs in a relatively small sample (N = 105) from a declining city of about 78,000 residents in the USA. Findings The authors found significant inverse correlations and found that, after controlling for length of residency, the entrepreneur’s perception of the city’s decline predicted lower place attachment. The authors also tested a moderation hypothesis and observed that, whereas professional-service entrepreneurs with both stronger and weaker perceptions of the city’s decline showed similar place attachment, non-professional entrepreneurs showed significantly more variation, displaying both the highest place attachment when weak in perceptions of the city’s decline and the lowest place attachment when strong in perceptions of the city’s decline. Research limitations/implications The authors discuss implications for place attachment, place image and place branding research, as well as for the study of place context’s effects on entrepreneurship. Practical implications Results hold implications for place branding’s participative development and for reasons to expect some difficulty in place branding when the context is a declining city. Originality/value Relative to prior research in place management, the research features a neglected segment of the city’s population, business owners, to study place attachment. Relative to prior entrepreneurship research, the authors advance the study of context’s effects on entrepreneurship by extending it to the place context of declining cities, which are not usually featured in entrepreneurship studies.

Product–place image and destination brand equity: special reference to “Kerala is an ayurvedic destination”

Purpose This paper aims to analyse the relationship between the image of a tourism product and destination brand equity in the context of Kerala's Ayurveda. The study also examined the influence of destination image (DI) and hospital brand image (HBI) and the mediating role of total experience (TEX). Design/methodology/approach The research analysed 342 primary data from Ayurvedic tourists who visited Kerala for the treatment. Findings Results show that product–place image (PPI) and DI significantly influence the brand equity, but the HBI is insignificant towards the brand equity. Even though HBI does not directly influence Kerala's brand equity, it has a strong relationship through TEX (mediating variable). Practical implications This study can be implemented by destination marketing organization and tourism authorities while making strategic decisions and plans for the image creation of a tourist place. Originality/value People perceive some products from a particular place as having superior quality and uniqueness. As far as a tourist destination is concerned, a “tourism product” associated with the destination will also uplift its popularity. The study has investigated the image of this “product–place” combination in medical tourism.

An image worth a thousand words? Expressions of stakeholder identity perspectives in place image descriptions

Purpose This paper aims to explore how place identity can be expressed in residents’ place image descriptions, addressing differences and similarities in place identity expressions between residents’ descriptions of the image of their place and the image of the place as described to others. Design/methodology/approach In-depth interviews were conducted with residents of a Swedish city. Place image descriptions were analyzed through thematic analysis. Findings Different types of identity perspectives manifest in the place image descriptions of residents. Respondents’ associations reflect place, person and social group identity perspectives, including their own perspective as residents, but also as visitors, or a combination of both. Priming is needed when gathering place image perceptions, to establish which underlying identity perspective is expressed. Research limitations/implications This study offers a Nordic perspective on the organic communication of place image. The scope and qualitative nature of this study is a limitation to its generalizability but also suggests a rich ground for future cross-cultural studies on the topic. Practical implications Results point to the importance of accurately formulating questions to catch stakeholders’ place image. Insights are offered into how stakeholders communicate Nordic place image perceptions when engaging in communication about a place and into the effects of identity on organic place brand communication. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to explore how key stakeholders’ lenses to interpret a place brand are activated in the communication of place image, and how this influences their descriptions of the place.

Community involvement in tourism: exploring the place image guided by the locals

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate on tourism sustainability and the need to involve local communities in planning practices, key to sustainable tourism. The community-based approach has been widely theorized and used in projects of sustainable tourism development, because it tends to maximize the participation of local population from the earliest stages of development and affect tourism policies, while also responding to the changing needs of contemporary tourists, especially in terms of development of niche and special-interest tourism. The only exception is in the construction of the tourist imaginary: the involvement of the community in this fundamental sphere has always been scarce, with the result that often there is a strong imbalance – even dissonance – between the image promoted through the marketing, that continuously re-shaped by the locals and that experienced by the tourists. This contribution will explore the creation of tourism imaginary as negotiated activity. Received: 03 February 2021Accepted: 01 March 2021

Design of Deep Learning-based Technology for Place Image Collecting

This research study designed a location image collecting technology. It provides the exact location information of an image which is not given in the photo to the user. Deep learning technology analysis and collects the images. The purpose of this service system is to provide the exact place name, location and the various information of the place such as nearby recommended attractions when the user upload the image photo to the service system. Suggested system has a deep learning model that has a size of 25.3MB, and the model repeats the learning process 50 times with a total of 15,266 data, performing 93.75% of the final accuracy. In a performance test, the final accuracy of the model is calculated 93.75%. This system can also be linked with various services potentially for further development.