Beyond the Brandopolis: A Communicative Approach to City Promotion and Marketing

A review of current city branding literature indicates that unsuccessful attempts at city branding appear to rely on creating static, flashy, and often idealized images of a city. Such marketing efforts may result in a "brandopolis," or images that may not reflect a city's true identity. This dissertation supplements current city branding literature by exploring how stakeholders' discourses form, enhance, and communicate a city's image. The consideration of a communicative approach to the promotion of city images, from a humanities perspective grounds stakeholders' experiences of the city in their communicative practices. This grounded communicative approach to city marketing offers marketers better insight into how the stories people tell about their experiences become part of the city's narrative identities. Understanding stakeholders' roles in crafting and communicating a city's narrative identities in their everyday discourses may help marketers promote the city's image beyond a mere brandopolis.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication and Rhetorical Studies

Year dc:date.available

2012

Author dc:creator

• Hudak, Kasey Clawson

Contributors dc:contributor

• Pat Arneson
• Calvin L Troup
• Richard H Thames

• Branding
• City
• Communication
• Discourse
• Marketing
• Promotion

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/669

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-1685