Cecilia Pasquinelli

The Limits of Place Branding for Local Development: The Case of Tuscany and the Arnovalley Brand

Place branding is increasingly part of the agenda of numerous public authorities, being deemed a tool for place management. Nations, regions, cities and inter-regional networks brand their developmental initiatives in order to attract and retain resources. In the light of the contemporary debate on regional and local development, this paper discusses the capacity of place branding to support an endogenous development, by legitimizing emerging social groups and by reinforcing their sense of place. The research analyzes the added value derived from the interplay of local actors who interact with the place brand. The aim is thus to understand the extent to which place branding boosts the crucial processes that lead to an endogenous development i.e. identity-building involving multiple local communities, social learning, and institutional changes. The investigation focuses on an attempt to brand the Tuscan innovative milieu, specifically the Arno Valley in Tuscan. Empirical evidence proves that the Arnovalley brand triggered limited social learning, fairly weak community-building, and left little room for institutional change.

Competition, cooperation and co-opetition: unfolding the process of inter-territorial branding

Territorial competition is considered as the main assumption of place branding, but this is not an exhaustive approach to understand it as part of local and regional development strategies. Within the frame of global competition, cities can undertake inter-territorial cooperation in order to enhance their competitiveness. In this regard, there is an evident gap in place branding literature which overlooks inter-territorial collaboration for place promotion. This article aims at unfolding the process of inter-territorial branding, that is, branding crossing administrative borders. ‘Market’ and political forces driving the emergence of inter-territorial brands as well as the phases of the underlying process are scrutinized by means of a secondary research reviewing 12 inter-territorial networking experiences in Europe and the United States.

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.

Branding Knowledge-intensive Regions: A Comparative Study of Pisa and Oulu High-Tech Brands

Place marketing and branding have drawn much attention both in the literature and in practice especially in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the research literature of place branding related to the dynamic evolution of knowledge-intensive regions is limited. This article aims at providing an analysis of place branding processes in knowledge-intensive regions in relation to the evolution of their high-tech clusters, in an attempt to identify the relation between brand development and cluster performance from a longitudinal perspective. The article discusses the results of a multiple case study, including Pisa, Italy and Oulu, Finland. The findings suggest that, in these two cases, branding consisted more in labelling an existing economic phenomenon rather than in fostering or having a bet on it in a visionary way. This is related to the political nature of branding which may provoke a mismatch between the timing of the high-tech cluster dynamics and the timing of branding initiatives, a mismatch which is likely to affect branding effectiveness and which should be considered when evaluating branding impacts.

Artist brand building: towards a spatial perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse how contemporary artists construct and position their “person brands” and reflects on the extent to which artist brand building results from strategic brand management. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework proposes a spatial perspective on artist brand building to reach an analytical insight into the case of visual artists in London. The empirical analysis is qualitative, based on serial and in-depth interviews, complemented by participant observations. Findings – Artist brand building relies on the creation and continuous redefinition of “in-between spaces” that exist at the blurred boundaries separating an individual and isolated art studio, and the social and visible art scene. Artist brand building is a bundle of mechanisms that, mainly occurring without strategic thinking, are “nested” within the art production process throughout which learning, producing and performing are heavily intertwined. Research limitations/implications – This ...

Branding peripheral knowledge-intensive regions: an insight into international innovation brands

Cecilia Pasquinelli and Jukka Teras examine the evolution of branding strategies in two peripheral regions aiming to develop and grow knowledge-intensive activity.

Tourism and regional economic resilience from a policy perspective: lessons from smart specialization strategies in Europe

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the contribution of tourism to regional economic resilience and questions the ways regional policy-makers recognize the relevance of tourism and integrate it into their regional development strategies (and, in particular, in regional innovation strategies). An exploratory analysis was carried out with a focus on the ‘smart specialization strategy’ documents, issued in Europe as required by the new programming phase of the structural funds. After defining the potential relevance of tourism as factor of regional economic resilience, a list of emerging innovation policies involving tourism was identified and linked to one of the following three types of regional economic resilience: ‘engineering resilience’, ‘ecological resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’.

The Local Embeddedness of Foreign Campuses: The Case of Tongji University in Florence

This article is based on the case study of the establishment of the campus of Tongji University (TU) in Florence, Italy, in 2014. This is the first offshore campus of a Chinese university in a Western country, showing an innovative trend, in particular concerning the legitimacy within the host sociopolitical and economic context. This article frames the case in the scenario of academic internationalization and Chinese higher education. The article analyzes the internationalization strategy of TU and the peculiar evolution of Florence as an “education hub,” and gives a detailed account of the process leading to the establishment of the campus. Conclusions emphasize the innovative features related to Tongji’s choice to follow a delocalized platform approach and to network with local actors. This imposes a more complex view of the impact on the host region.

Tourism in the City

Tourism is undergoing fundamental changes with regard to market, industry structure and the product itself; changes driven by an even more fundamental transition to ‘post-modern’ patterns of consumption that makes tourism one of the benchmarks of modes of production and consumption in the knowledge economy. Tourism plays, quantitatively and qualitatively, an unprecedented role in shaping economic development, while consolidated tourism models should rapidly adapt themselves to a new and changing reality. This chapter introduces and provides the background for the discussion developed in this book, which addresses multiple interconnections between tourism and the city from a policy-oriented research standpoint. After an overview of trends characterising city tourism in the global context, the chapter focuses on Europe, where city tourism has been the most dynamic tourism segment. However, besides EU engagement with the development of a tourism policy framework, urban tourism seems to play a secondary role in the European tourism vision, in which tourism is interpreted as a potential economic alternative for lagging areas where other economic drivers have been historically weak. Through discussion of possible explanations, the chapter develops an analysis of the EU Urban Portal to outline tourism representation in connection with the urban agenda of the European Union and concludes by presenting this book’s structure.

Il Brand Reticolare. Strumenti di analisi per la costruzione di un marchio di luogo

005 Riassunto Muovendo da una rassegna della letteratura, l’articolo si propone di applicare il paradigma relazionale al branding di luogo. Definito il concetto di brand reticolare, gli autori propongono una procedura di analisi per un suo utilizzo nella ricerca empirica. Tale strumento interpretativo e utilizzato nell’analisi del caso Val di Cornia (Toscana), una rete di comuni che cooperano per lo sviluppo locale. Grazie alla social network analysis - che costituisce una novita metodologica in tale ambito di ricerca - gli autori riflettono sulla capacita della rete di favorire un cambio di immagine e, dunque, effetti di re-branding dell’area mediante la definizione di un nuovo spazio fisico da cui vengono estrapolati nuovi elementi identitari. Oltre a testare gli strumenti analitici proposti, i risultati della ricerca consentono di dimostrare l’effettivo processo di re-branding in Val di Cornia e suggeriscono l’importanza di una strategia di marchio ben definita ai fini di una sua sostenibilita.