Purpose – The branding of places has gained popularity among city officials in recent years. Unfortunately, place marketers often disregard the complexity of place brands, as do their counterparts in the academic discussion: the focus repeatedly falls on the simple explorative description of certain city brands, rather than a proper conceptualization of a place brand that employs different measurement approaches for the different elements of the brand. Thus, this paper aims to identify those different elements and discuss measurement approaches that could prove useful in place branding.Design/methodology/approach – Following a review of the extant literature on the measurement of brand image in general and place branding in particular, the paper outlines distinct elements, categories and dimensions of a place brand, as well as a number of approaches from place brand image measurement, with example cases of each approach.Findings – Exploring a brand can be divided into three main approaches: in the form of...

How to catch a city? The concept and measurement of place brands

This article attempts to ‘rethink’ place brands after examining in detail how people form them in their minds. The article starts with a very brief account of the place branding literature to provide the necessary background and goes on to identify what we see as a shortcoming in current understanding of the place brand: the dominant idea that brands are formed as sums of mental associations. The article attempts to take current understanding of place brands further by going beyond associations and adding a missing element: the interactions between those associations. We propose a rethinking of place brands based on two pillars: first we incorporate more geographical understanding into place branding and, second, we outline a process that allows place elements and placebased associations to combine and form the place brand. The place brand formation process starts when people use place-making elements (materiality, practices, institutions and representations) to form mental associations with the place. Th...

/pdf/rethinking-the-place-brand-the-interactive-formation-of-5btf8jvd9r.pdf

Rethinking the place brand: the interactive formation of place brands and the role of participatory place branding

https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/28723/1/zenker%202016.pdf

Branding the destination versus the place: The effects of brand complexity and identification for residents and visitors

Is satisfaction the key? The role of citizen satisfaction, place attachment and place brand attitude on positive citizenship behavior

As the competition between them increases, cities focus more and more on establishing themselves as brands. Consequently, cities invest an extensive amount of taxpayers’ money into their marketing activities. Unfortunately, cities still lack a proper success measurement, which has raised questions regarding the efficient and effective use of taxpayers’ money. With this contribution, we want to highlight some existing, but primarily new, possibilities for a complex success measurement in place marketing, referring to the extant literature on place marketing and the general field of marketing. Therefore, we strive to translate different concepts such as customer equity or customer satisfaction into the lexicon of place marketing, thus identifying empirical gaps for further research, as well as existing fruitful approaches.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpb.2011.5.pdf

Measuring Success in Place Marketing and Branding

https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/21853/1/For%20a%20copy%20of%20this%20paper%20please%20contact%20Sibylle%20Petersen%2c%20sibylle.petersenatuni.lu.pdf

Andreas Aholt

Papers

The Citizen Satisfaction Index (CSI): Evidence for a Four Basic Factor Model in a German Sample

Development and Implementation of the Citizen Satisfaction Index (CSI): Four Basic Factors of Citizens’ Satisfaction