City Branding and the Power of Netnography in the Era of Social Media

The development of Web 2.0 tools has changed the ways that cities communicate and build their brands. A growing number of travelers are influenced by user generated content, presenting a number of challenges and opportunities for city branding. This chapter will focus on the use of Internet and social media as international marketing communications techniques for cities and destinations. The chapter offers insights to city branding practitioners on how online city branding is carried out and suggests that using social media is an appropriate strategy to promote cities because of its participative and interactive nature. However, it is also emphasized that city branding practitioners should evaluate social media as an opportunity to get closer to customer, instead of a mechanism to be controlled. Exploring implications for practitioners, the chapter can be regarded as an important contribution to an area which is still fairly new and unexplored. The chapter also contributes to the city branding literature by introducing the use of netnography in city branding research.

A Theoretical Approach for Sustainable Communication in City Branding

The key to success of cities having high brand-value and awareness is the configuration of successful brand structures for the participation of stakeholders into the process. Starting from this point, symmetric and sustainable communication among stakeholders is assumed to play an essential role as a prerequisite for achieving success. The key to ensuring sustainable practice of any discipline is the communication. In this regard, in infrastructure, renovation, finance, tourism, sociology and cultural studies, the symmetry and participation of all of the parties are also considered to be important in terms of communication. Alongside the theoretical framework of city branding, this chapter seeks to contribute to the literature with “Multilateral Symmetrical Communication Model,” which has been created to meet the requirements for city brands. The impact of stakeholders' interaction on the brand image, the impact of ensuring multilateral communication between both parts, and demonstrating applicability of these are the main focuses of this chapter.

Business Fabric and Place Branding

In some downtown locations entrepreneurship is flourishing. While current geospatial analysis including planning scaled Geospatial Information Systems provide zip code or census trade information, the street-scale dimension of business fabric goes unmeasured. The research presented in this chapter investigate use of a new geospatial methodology to formulate, collect data and analyze and visualize business, architectural and entrepreneurial data at the resolution of individual street addresses. On-site data was collected at street address for downtown business areas in Barcelona, Spain, Portland and Eugene, Oregon, and Jersey City, New Jersey. The finding reveal new understanding of both methodologies to compute and communicate understandings of business fabric and also initial affirmations of geospatial relationship between business activities and benefits of nearby urban design amenities such as open space, third-space and affordability.

Exploring City Branding as a Tool to Conserve Urban Green Infrastructure in Developing Countries

Cities are aggressively pushing themselves to become global destinations for economic activities resulting in various environmental stresses. The situation in developing countries such as India is not too different either. Cities are reinventing themselves to emerge as a global destination to attract talent, investment and tourism. City Branding is one such marketing strategy wherein key aspect(s) of a city (cultural, environmental, infrastructure, etc.) is used to project it as a brand, thus garnering competitive advantages and co benefits. This article, however, examines the city branding tool in a different perspective. By reviewing branding theories, concepts and case studies, this article explores the possible use of city branding strategy in conserving and promoting green infrastructure. Theoretical assessments undertaken in this article indicate that city branding has a potential to contribute positively towards cities' developmental aspirations and improving the quality of life of its citizens, leading to an environmentally sustainable urban development in India.

Steps toward a City Marketing Mix and Its Perception Measurement

Cities compete for limited resources and face various challenges. Changing conditions have increased awareness and interest in city marketing. However, in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the acquisition of investments, tourism and community development, change in the city marketing mix is most important. Marketing experts transferred general marketing concepts to be within the scope of cities, but due to the complexity of the structure of the city, the best model in the context of marketing mix has still not been found. Any attempt in this direction is therefore theoretically and practically relevant. This paper aims to encompass various perspectives and introduces a city marketing mix, which takes into account the complexity, functionality and structure of the cities. It also presents a measurement instrument of city marketing mix that can be used as a sophisticated tool to satisfy the needs of city residents, who are considered to be the most valuable assets of the city.

Country of Origin Effects

This chapter develops the concept of the county of origin effect, and explores how linkages between place and product may impact upon it. Country-of-origin research has tended to focus upon how geographical associations may assist the marketing of certain products (halo effects) and indeed protect brand images from negative place-based associations (shield effects). We seek to develop these ideas by investigating the existence of branding spillovers in the opposite direction i.e. from product to regional image. Thus we argue in favour of a more ‘holistic' view of country-of-origin effects. This is done using the illustrative case of Wales. The chapter then seeks to explore the resulting implications for city branding practitioners and policy-makers, and to speculate upon how the observed linkages between place and product can also lead to broader insights in terms of city branding in the international context. Finally how the findings presented might contribute to future research attempts on city branding is considered.

The Effect of Religious Affiliation on Nation/Place Image

Tourism industry is related to food and beverage, transportation, accommodation and many more fields. For this reason, tourism marketing is gaining importance all over the world. Most of the fastest growing tourism countries' promotion activities are increasingly raising the popularity and importance of these countries. Tourism has an important role in the development of countries as a service industry and a multi-faceted concept. Hence, tourism activities currently have gained new forms, new insights and new methods. One of them are faith or pilgrimage based tours. Today, for travels especially made for cultural purpose, religion is one of the leading factors. For example, Benares in Brahman, Mecca and Madinah in Islam, Jerusalem and Ephesus in Christianity are religious places attracted many of tourists due to the pilgrimage. This major movements of migration making for religious purposes affect regions, countries and destinations in terms of the economic and social aspects. This situation creates economic opportunities for countries which have consistently balance of payments deficit. In addition to this, religious trips impress people spiritually, physically, mentally, socially and emotionally. Therefore, people visit the holy places of the faith they belong. For this reason, faith activities in different parts of the world attracted millions of people annually. Among them religious buildings, rituals, festivals, spiritual and religious events are important factors that affect the behaviour of tourists and directs people to faith tourism.

Defining Place Image

The image of a place is important as it has implications for investments made in cities, workforce locations, and tourism. Place image incorporates concepts including brand, visual image, reputation, the sense of place, and the identity of the place - all of which create an overall image of a place and can lead to investment or abandonment. Place image has ramifications for decisions made about the place, including where businesses locate, where workers live, and where tourists visit (Smith, 2006). Place image has serious ramifications for decisions made about the place as people choose to stay, work, visit, and invest. This research outlines the inconsistencies in the literature, clarifies the terminology, and begins to set research standards for how place image is described through a conceptual model.

Building City Brand through Social Media

The recent transition from city marketing to city branding heralds a new era of representation and signification of cities as brands where conscious and planned practices are used to promote them as any other economic commodity. Given the tremendous impact of social media on brand image, city branding has to embrace this new channel to promote their cities as brands. On social media platforms users forming a brand community can significantly influence the brand image by co-creating the user-generated contents. Today, users search for information online and their behaviors and responses are influenced by online social networks and community practices. In addition, they perceive information from online social community highly credible and useful. As traditional firm generated information is losing its persuasive power to social media, it is never late for managers of city branding to embark on social media platforms to support online social media brand communities which in turn would influence city brand image positively by engaging users. Social media provides an excellent platform for users to form social media brand communities, where they can share inside knowledge and discuss about brands. The greater credibility of user generated contents on these platforms can significantly influence the user perception about the brands. The focus of this paper is to investigate challenges and opportunities of online social media brand communities in influencing brand image.

Health Tourism-Based Destination Marketing

Visits of people for their health caused health tourism to be created. Health tourism has a great market share in the world with a volume of 100 billion dollars. A big battle has started between companies and countries that want to get share from this market. It became necessary to be act professionally because of the competition in health tourism sector. It is very important to know the market, to determine customer requests and needs, to know the advantageous and disadvantageous of competitors and to positions itself at the correct place. It is necessary to focus on international market at health tourism process. Politicians and the government has a big role in being a destination in health tourism sector. All the factors in service process are important parts of both service quality and of branding process.