Exploring the impact of factors influencing case selection in the place branding literature from 2014 to 2018

ABSTRACT

Recently, place branding has received increasing attention from both academic and policy circles. As place branding is an interdisciplinary field, scholars from different backgrounds have contributed to the research. Previous literature review studies have summarized the key disciplines in place branding fields, including urban studies, marketing, tourism, and public management. The goal of this work is to examine the impact of influencing factors on the case selection pattern in place branding literature from 2014 to 2018. First, we raise seven hypotheses about the case selection mechanism from perspectives of branding strategies (public management field), marketing strategies (marketing field), urban characteristics (urban studies), tourism attraction (tourism field), and scholar proximity (other factors), respectively. Second, we test the proposed hypotheses in aggregated cases and comparative cases using Poisson regression and qualitative comparative analysis. We found that the previous focus of city branding study was on Europe, and more attention has started to be paid to North America, Asia, and Oceania in the last 5 years. As for influencing factors, we observe that the scholar proximity is significantly related to the case selection, while urban characteristics, branding strategies, marketing strategies, and tourist attractions are less influential.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jingyu Liang from School of Architecture, South China University of Technology for drawing the map in Figure 2 in this paper. The authors are also indebted to the discussion with colleagues, including Wei Yang (Delft University of Technology), Dr. Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko (University of Tampere), and Johnson Chan (the Chinese University of Hong Kong).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. “place branding” OR “place brand” OR “place marketing” OR “place promoting” OR “place promotion” OR “city branding” OR “city brand” OR “city marketing” OR “city promoting” OR “city promotion” OR “urban branding” OR “urban brand” OR “urban marketing” OR “urban promoting” OR “urban promotion” OR “destination branding” OR “destination brand” OR “destination marketing” OR “destination promoting” OR “destination promotion.”

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41925003) and the Philosophy and Social Sciences Major Project Fund of the Ministry of Education, No. 18JZD029.

Notes on contributors

Haiyan Lu

Haiyan Lu gained the PhD degree on the topic of place branding and urban development in China in the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 2018. Haiyan Lu is a postdoc working in Peking University on the infrastructure governance in China. Her research is to understand place branding at the regional and municipal scales, ranging from identities and labels in planning documents to city images created around urban projects. She also focuses on how the local governments in China have reacted to national eco-smart city policies in a multi-level governance system and adopt corresponding policy instrument initiatives in urban projects. Recently, she also studied the sustainable development between urban and rural areas from the infrastructure provision perspective.

Wenting Ma

Wenting Ma is a PhD candidate in public policy at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology. She is currently working on her PhD project, researching issues connected to the city branding implementation and sustainable urban transformation in China. This research will explore how Chinese cities translate their city branding strategies into practices. Specially, she does this research from different perspectives, including conceptual understanding, stakeholder involvement, strategies application, and policy instrument combinations. Additionally, Wenting is also interested in the policy instrument configurations of low carbon city construction.

Qihui Yang

Qihui Yang received her MS degree in Engineering Policy and Analysis from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2017. She is currently working toward the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kansas State University. Her current research focuses on agent-based modeling and network-based modeling.

Pengjun Zhao

Pengjun Zhao is a professor in Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Peking University, and the editor-in-chief for Cities (Elsevier). He is also the director of Centre for Urban Planning and Transport Studies at Peking University. He obtained his PhD degree and postdoctoral training in spatial planning at University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research mostly focuses on spatial planning and sustainable transportation. He has more than 200 research outputs, 70 of which are first-author articles in international peer-reviewed SSCI journals, such as Transportation Research A, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning A, and Land Use Policy, among others. He was ranked as one of the most cited Chinese researchers by Elsevier in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. He has obtained more than ¥8 million in research grants as the principal investigator for 22 research projects.