A Psychological Perspective on City Brand Positioning

Today the competition between cities is no longer a national game, but global, pitting emerging markets against traditional Western centers of economic power and decision makers have wholeheartedly embraced branding as a way to differentiate their cities in the competition for investments, talents and visitors. Hosting mega-events has become a popular branding strategy, which however requires significant contributions from the public purse. It is therefore necessary to develop analytical approaches, which can mitigate the risk of failure brought about by aspirational overreach. This chapter aims at articulating a starting point for formulating city brand positioning strategies based on studies of contemporary city ranking literature and two case studies concerning Shanghai and Istanbul. This chapter demonstrates how sensemaking data can be converted into quantitative measures and organized in a 16 dimensional construct enabling researchers to identify the most important perceptional dimensions of the city experience for the purpose of developing realistic city brand positioning.