Place Images and Marketing Promotion of a City (Exemplified by Irkutsk)

Abstract

We examine territorial marketing, a direction of regional policy, which is gaining increasing popularity across the globe; it emerged at the interface of marketing and socio–economic geography and is based on the notion of the uniqueness of each place. We discuss the methodological issues related to this direction and to its relevance to Irkutsk. A study is made of the use and prospects of the images of the city of Irkutsk as the tools for the promotion of the place and the attraction of migrants and tourists. The investigation was made at different geographical scales: regional (Irkutsk–Baikal); microgeographical toponymics, and statistical analysis of the individual perception of the city. Use was made of different investigation techniques: a multi–scale treatment of the same geographic phenomena against the background of the world, the country, the region and the agglomeration; analysis of the city’s recreational–geographical location as a variety of the economic–geographic location; comparison of street names according to the locality of the names, that is, the extent to which they are connected with the history and culture of the city as well as according to their popularity and content analysis of texts and images taken from the Internet and belonging both to tourists and to local residents, and images in the field of emotions. Some recommendations are made for the use of the images of the city in its marketing promotion. It is pointed out that the identified images were used in practice; in particular, in designing the historical № 130 Quarter in Irkutsk where timber representing one of the city images was widely used.