Exploring the impact of factors influencing case selection in the place branding literature from 2014 to 2018

Abstract

Recently, place branding has received increasing attention from both academic and policy circles. As place branding is an interdisciplinary field, scholars from different backgrounds have contributed to the research. Previous literature review studies have summarized the key disciplines in place branding fields, including urban studies, marketing, tourism, and public management. The goal of this work is to examine the impact of influencing factors on the case selection pattern in place branding literature from 2014 to 2018. First, we raise seven hypotheses about the case selection mechanism from perspectives of branding strategies (public management field), marketing strategies (marketing field), urban characteristics (urban studies), tourism attraction (tourism field), and scholar proximity (other factors), respectively. Second, we test the proposed hypotheses in aggregated cases and comparative cases using Poisson regression and qualitative comparative analysis. We found that the previous focus of city branding study was on Europe, and more attention has started to be paid to North America, Asia, and Oceania in the last 5 years. As for influencing factors, we observe that the scholar proximity is significantly related to the case selection, while urban characteristics, branding strategies, marketing strategies, and tourist attractions are less influential.