Rebranding a "rather strange, definitely unique" city via co-creation with its residents

: Ulla Hakala, Arja Lemmetyinen, Lenita Nieminen

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

: 2020

: Place Branding and Public Diplomacy

: PLACE BRANDING AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

: PLACE BRANDING PUBLI

: 16

: 316

: 325

: 10

: 1751-8040

: 1751-8059

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-020-00173-4

The purpose of this study is to investigate how a city can be rebranded as a result of co-creation with its residents, using the city of Pori in Finland as a case example. Residents play a critical role in co-creation as they live the city; it is they who make the place. Indeed, the inclusion of residents is often requested in contemporary place-branding literature (e.g. Giovanardi et al. in: Kavaratzis et al. (eds) Inclusive place branding. Critical perspectives on theory and practice, Routledge, London, 2017). Citing the communication coordinator, the case city has had a brand, but the brand has not been documented; it has had a logo but has not had a brand manual. The administrative functions have acted independently, each implementing its own version of a brand, i.e. the brand has been fragmented. Accordingly, the aim of the co-creation process was to reform and reorganize Pori's brand - not make a city make-over but develop the city and its brand on strategic level. There are recent articles on the co-creation of a place brand from the bottom-up approach (e.g., Casais and Monteiro in Place Brand Public Dipl 15:229-237, 2019; Hudson et al. in J Vacat Mark 23:365-377, 2017), yet practically no studies on engaging residents in a city's rebranding process. Overall, scientific articles on rebranding are scarce. This study expands knowledge in both areas by carefully investigating and documenting the co-creative rebranding process from initiation to implementation over a 5-year timeline. For this, various qualitative methods were applied, and various sources of data used, e.g., 100 residents interviewed.