How the Creative Class Co-creates a City’s Brand Identity
A Qualitative Study
Place branding is a relatively new concept in the branding literature, and it has been mainly used by policymakers as a means of differentiation of destinations. In the past decade, place branding explores how the creative class contributes to a city’s brand identity and, by doing so, been conceptualized as the process of building a place brand based on its identity and a positive place image and is therefore a vital strategy within the field of hospitality and tourism management. This article delivers valuable advice for marketing representatives of creative cities.
It is crucial to understand relationships between people and places to develop a place brand. The place brand identity is shaped by shared perceptions across a community, which, in turn, influence stakeholders’ attitudes, values, and meanings. Brand identity was initially conceptualized as a unique set of brand associations but has recently evolved to a conceptualization that is dynamic, reciprocal, and interactive. Place brand identity is described as a sum of sociocultural meanings and socio-spatial interactions that occur among residents, local institutions, and other internal and external actors.
This study aimed to analyse how the creative class contributes to the co-creation of a city’s brand identity. Because knowledge within this important field of research is scarce, a qualitative research design was used and aimed to collect detailed and rich information through the practice of personal in-depth interviews.
Like for every other city, the starting point for a creative city’s brand management activities is a clear understanding of the brand identity. The DNA of the three cities included in the study sample was described with words such as ‘freedom’, ‘change’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘spacy’ and ‘creative’ for Berlin; ‘forward-looking, dynamic and ‘open’ for Glasgow and ‘creative, young and multicultural’ for Malmö. But a city’s brand identity is nothing that gets constructed—it has emerged over time, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years, and is present even if people are not aware of it.
In the context of creative cities, brand identity gets influenced by different stakeholders to various degrees. This study shows that Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and the creative class are both important stakeholders in the enactment of a city’s brand identity.
DMOs play a crucial role in the enactment of a city’s brand identity. Their formal representatives usually initiate ‘the official’ brand management process The creative class changes the way a city looks and feels, mainly (a) through creative artefacts and (b) through their personalities.
Stakeholders’ experience of a place, through the constructs’ influence on brand meaning, changes the place brand identity over time: the mix of both brings new rhythms and forms of expression to the cityscape.
The study findings demonstrate that the creative class is an active stakeholder in the brand-building process of cities with different sizes and typologies. The creative class enacts naturally the creation of the brand meaning and genuine value linked to the intrinsic characteristics of a place.
A co-creation approach to place brand identity benefits businesses and tourists by offering a dynamic and unique value proposition that makes a creative place attractive to work in, live in and visit.
Article details:
How the Creative Class Co-creates a City’s Brand Identity: A Qualitative Study
Clarinda Rodrigues, Holger J. Schmidt
First Published May 5, 2021 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/23949643211010594
Journal of Creating Value