TALES OF CITIES: CITY BRANDING THROUGH STORYTELLING

Abstract

As an intriguing concept, storytelling has attracted many researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, a specific context of storytelling approach, city branding through storytelling has rarely been reported in the literature. In this study, we show how cities can regard storytelling as a strategic branding tool and investigate how authorities and marketers can create the core story of a city’s brand. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, the theoretical framework proposed highlights the role of storytelling both as a strategic branding concept, and as an operational communication tool in the city brand building process. Second, based on the Laboratory model of Fog et. al. (2005) we propose a strong basic framework for city brand through; scanning basic internal and external information, distilling basic information, formulating core story and the ACID test. Third, this research integrates storytelling literature to the city marketing literature through offering a basis framework where the process of generating the city's core story consists of four elements (message, conflict, cognitive and affective components and plot) leaning on the critical principles of storytelling.