Tracing the Origins of Place Branding Research: A Bibliometric Study of Concepts in Use (1980–2018)

Abstract

Place branding is seriously studied in various academic disciplines. Its impact on strategic development plays a vital role in processes of sustainable urban transformation. Place branding originated in tourism management and over time its research focus spilled over and evolved in environmental science, urban studies and public administration. Scholars and policy makers are currently faced with a myriad of concepts in place branding research, which show considerable overlap but should be carefully distinguished from each other. To increase our understanding of this body of research, this article observes a strong pattern of the concepts in use, in their references to location types (i.e., urban, city, destination, place) and broadcasting activities (branding, marketing, promotion). It builds on this observation by collecting studies from the Scopus database by location type and broadcasting activities (LT–BA) reference pairs and systematically analysing and reviewing these from 1980 to 2018. A total of 2665 articles and reviews were identified and analysed based on (1) occurrences per reference pair, (2) co-occurrences per reference pair, and (3) co-occurrences for each reference pair with other concepts. On that basis, the origin and evolution of the research field including multiple reference pairs in use is explored and described.

City Brand Personality Projected by Municipalities from Central and Eastern Europe Countries—A Comparison of Facebook Usage

“…As a research area, place branding is an evolving multi-disciplinary domain which covers a large variety of topics and disciplines, including urban planning, marketing, public policy, and sociology [28]. As a local government practice, place branding is currently often used as a governance strategy meant to create better environmental, social, and economic conditions [29][30][31]. Due to the fact that people, capital, and knowledge are increasingly less related to the location, the development of places as brands helps to foster an environment capable of attracting new forms of activity and key groups [32].…”

“…Branding is also considered as a key instrument for overcoming challenges tackled by contemporary cities which block their sustainable growth, such as environmental pollution, regional disproportions, and weak economy. The appearance of such problems in a city requires balanced transformation that refers to, for example, changes in the structure of local industry or innovative infrastructural solutions [31]. With this regard, many local governments try to introduce a place branding concept into their sustainable transformation process, treating it as an essential tool that allows for establishing a good reputation of a given city and maintaining its attractiveness among external stakeholders [31,[34][35][36][37][38][39].…”

“…In making a decision to pursue the strategic approach to shaping the desired image of a city, local governments search for elements of identity which will allow them to build an attractive image both externally as well as internally (understood as the way in which it is perceived by its inhabitants) [51]. Among these components there increasingly emerge issues concerning a city's sustainable growth [39], including its positioning as an eco-oriented city, green city, innovative, or smart city [31,52], livable or just sustainable city [53]. In the literature, there are different ways of defining the term "sustainable city", but these different approaches contain several common features, such as: the systematic or ecological consideration of city functioning, care for the local quality of life, and residents' satisfaction with city life, activities aimed at social inclusion or enabling social participation in city management [19,53].…”

City Branding and Industrial Transformation from Manufacturing to Services: Which Pathways do Cities in Central China Follow?

“…Tourism has a reputation of being ecologically friendly rather than resource-extracting or contaminating, unlike manufacturing, which suggests it is more in line with what ecological modernization requires. This is a first reason for cities to highlight this aspect; another is that much city promotion, marketing and branding was traditionally done for tourism purposes and part of this routine practice has been preserved [46].…”

Bibliometric Overview of Trends in Contemporary Brand Management

“…[8] Verifying approach to the trends in brand management was applied also by Ma et al who provided bibliometric analysis of place branding. [9] Another trend in bibliometric research consists in regional focusing on the brand management hot topics. [10] Unfortunately, neither this approach is convenient although it eliminates the lack of previous one which consists in verification of relevance of selected brand management topic.…”