People identify with places via their names. But what happens if the name changes due to a municipality consolidation? In our paper, we will analyse the impact of a name change on place branding as well as on residents and small and medium size enterprises. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss place branding and place names in a changing situation, i.e. place mergers. Geographically, this study covers the South-Western province of Finland. We address the phenomenon by a two-phase empirical research: 1) a survey among local people, and 2) interviews of SME companies that have the place name adjunct to their company name.

Keywords: place branding; place identification; onomastics; identity; image