Investigating the contribution of culture to city branding: A modelling approach with reference to Athens, Istanbul and Rome

Abstract

The thesis follows a bottom-up approach in order to provide a structural guide for evaluating city branding efforts. Focusing on the tourism perspective and the cultural city brand, the thesis and the research undertaken for it reveal several gaps regarding the application of corporate and product brand equity in the respective field. Therefore, the study identifies and attempts to clarify and fill significant gaps in this application of brand equity. An examination of the respective literature in city branding, cultural tourism and destination brand equity is provided. The need to provide a more complete tool for evaluating the city branding efforts addressing to a significant stakeholders, international tourists, emerges. The practical application for investigating the contribution of culture to city branding follows a modeling approach which tests and validates an integrated cultural brand equity model in three European cities (Athens, Istanbul and Rome). Developments in city branding often evolve around Anholt’s hexagon (2003). Place branding has turned into a popular strategy believed to lead to increased competitiveness and differentiation. Given the complexity and different challenges which have to be considered when attempting to evaluate each one of the hexagon dimensions, a study in the field needs to focus on specific hexagon dimensions. Therefore, the two dimensions, which attract much interest in the literature, namely tourism and culture & heritage have been selected. The thesis argues that when city stakeholders want to capitalize on these two dimensions, knowledge of their cultural brand and tourists’ perspectives and evaluations of this cultural brand should be the starting point for every successful effort. Within the destination branding literature, measuring the performance of destination brands has attracted some academic interest. Unlike the previous versatility in measuring the customer’s perspective on brands, some efforts leading to an agreement on common measures are recognized. These steps are evident in analyses based on Aaker (1991) and Keller’s (1993, 2003) categorizations. According to the seminal work made by Aaker (1991), brand equity measures are classified into five dimensions: 1) awareness, 2) associations/image, 3) perceived quality, 4) loyalty and 5) brand assets. Nevertheless, only the first four attributes are commonly included in brand equity models in the destination branding context. However, this thesis seeks to assess all five brand equity dimensions in the case of cultural destinations. Besides, brand assets may lead to a competitive advantage (Aaker, 1991). Therefore, in the case of a cultural city, different representations of the city culture could contribute in the creation of a competitive advantage. […]