Assessment of brand attractiveness of the city of Yekaterinburg based on “The brand box model”

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the attractiveness of the city’s brand using the Brand Box Model by L. de Chernatony and G. McWilliam. Despite the fact that territorial branding has become an integral part of local political and administrative life, its success, as the literature review shows, is modest. The authors suggest that one of the reasons for this state of affairs is the imperfection of the methodology for measuring the city’s brand, and propose the testing of the Brand Box Model. The study presents the results of a sociological survey among the residents and visitors of the city of Yekaterinburg at the age of 18 and older with a total sample size of 465 observations. The analysis made it possible to identify four groups of the public with different attitudes regarding the brand of the Ural capital. The results obtained indicate the influence of gender, age, and professional characteristics of respondents on the perception of functional and emotional-symbolic attributes of the city’s brand. The results were obtained using the K-means method, as well as the Ward’s method and the Euclidean distance square. The authors conclude that the Brand Box Model is an adequate theoretical construction for analyzing territorial brands.