Branding Strategies for Small Cities in the Internet Space

Abstract

The paper examines the use of communicative strategies and tools for promoting local territories on the Internet on the material of tourist sites, social networks and blogs. Internet strategy depends on the promoted territory, pragmatic goals and determines the selection of tools and language means. The authors applied an integrative communicative approach. It was established that a European small town brand is developed by employing macro strategy including historical, cultural, environmental, and gastronomic references represented in several foreign languages. The small Russian town branding is implemented through micro-strategies with a heterogeneous brand structure, sometimes, related to some important events, not supported by significant historical facts in Russian. Lingua-pragmatic analysis of data has shown that specialized travel sites of European and Russian small towns use mostly informative tactics for promoting their territories while communicative tactics of social networks and blogs are of a greater emotion and evaluative value. The experience of European small towns, and communicative strategies of brand promotion in particular, might be relevant for Russian locality identification and differentiation, small town brand development, formation of cultural apprehension and loyalty among the citizens as well as domestic and foreign tourists.