Andrea Lucarelli

City branding: a state‐of‐the‐art review of the research domain

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to carry out a contemporary and concise “state-of-the-art” review of the city branding research domain, in particular how scholars have approached this field of st ...

Unraveling the complexity of "city brand equity" : a three-dimensional framework

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for the analysis and evaluation of city brands equity that is firmly anchored to the interdisciplinary characteristics of the city brandi ...

Problematising place branding research: A meta-theoretical analysis of the literature

Place branding is commonly understood as the general phenomenon of marketing, branding, promoting and regeneration of a particular city, region and/or location. Place branding has attracted an increasing number of researchers belonging to different disciplines producing a highly interdisciplinary literature. However, the complexity and problems connected with it has not been coped with sufficiently in previous studies. Therefore the aim of the present paper is to problematise place branding research by performing a meta-theoretical analysis of the literature. The authors do this by adopting the mod el developed by Burrell and Morgan (1979) that helps to highlight different ontological and epistemological foundations. The analysis is based on a corpus of 292 articles retrieved from different databases. From the analysis the authors propose a framework based on six different perspectives of place branding. The paper concludes by suggesting areas that future studies should address.

Towards brand ecology : An analytical semiotic framework for interpreting the emergence of place brands

Brand-management philosophy has recently expanded to include public and spatial contexts producing a cacophony of logos, slogans and events all aimed at promoting and marketing places. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding about how the brand-management philosophy changes when moving into and across places and in which way places change when affected by this way of thinking. Through a multi-site ethnography of three Italian territories, this paper applies a semiotic framework (based on the constructs of syntax, semantics and pragmatics) to interpret the interweaving of procedures, mechanisms and symbols that underpin the emergence of place brands. The enquiry reveals that each place brand is characterised by a specific level of integration (‘symbiosis’) between functional and representational dimensions. By recognising this interrelatedness through an ecological perspective that focuses on the connections among all the constituents of a place, the concept of brand ecology is offered to unpack the complexity of place brands and to reconsider the relationship between place branding and place marketing approaches.

Brand transformation: a performative approach to brand regeneration

Abstract Traditional brand management literature largely implies that the brand regeneration process is linear, atomistic and rather harmonic, thus reducing the complexity of the process to individual parts that can be managed rationally and logically in sequence. By ontologically as well as epistemologically adopting a performative approach where brands are seen as loose performative assemblages, the present article suggests instead that the brand regeneration process is truly processual, multiple and political. A specific brand regeneration process should be seen as relationally spatial and as only one of several possible ‘realities’. The argument is based on an analysis of a 5-year-long case study of the branding of Stockholm, inspired by a Latourian hybrid fieldwork approach. Based on the analysis, the novel concept ‘brand transformation’ is suggested to frame the characteristics and complexities of the brand regeneration process.