Tourism and the Branded City

Film and Identity on the Pacific Rim

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John G. Gammack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754648291
• eBook ISBN: 9781317009634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Comparing the major Pacific Rim cities of Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai, this book examines world city branding. Whilst all three cities compete on the world's stage for events, tourists and investment, they are also at the centre of distinct film traditions and their identities are thus strongly connected with a cinematic impression. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book not only analyses the city branding of these cities from the more widely researched perspectives of tourism, marketing and regional development, but also draws in cultural studies and psychology approaches which offer fresh and useful insights to place branding and marketing in general. The authors compare and contrast qualitative and quantitative original data as well as critically analyzing current texts and debates on city branding. In conclusion, they argue that city branding should contribute not only to regional development and identity, but also to sustainable economic well-being and public happiness.

Chapter 1
A Discussion of Method

Cities can and have been examined through a range of specific disciplinary lenses, but the resulting insights rarely cross silos to integrate and inform distinct modes of practice, or to inspire and enrich new lines of theorization. Traditionally, branding too has been narrowly equated with marketing, as we shall discuss in Chapter 2. However, especially in relation to entities as complex as a world city, it engages deeper questions far beyond that discipline’s traditional scope. The journey of this book is to explore and demonstrate the possibilities offered by multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary1 research across, in particular, cultural studies, and film studies, marketing and psychology in the complex theoretical and applied problematic of ‘branding the city’. Knowledge production, driven by wider social and economic agendas and accountability contexts, is increasingly characterized by heterogeneity, structural diversity and breadth of practical application beyond disciplines (see Gibbons et al. 1994).2

In this opening chapter, we shall discuss the modes of collection, evaluation and analysis of primary and secondary data from a series of studies and probes, noting both the benefits and challenges of working across quite different paradigms of thought, vocabulary and expected outcome. Our concern is to demonstrate the value of collaboration in cultural research, while at the same time acknowledging the problems of establishing a working and meaningful discursive field across disciplinary boundaries, interests and methodological habits. While a disciplinary focus implies competing, though equally valid, discursive objectives, collaboration is presented here as a continuum across researchers, team members and participants in the fieldwork. This gives a common focus relevant to both academic and practical constituencies, though their respective orientations to the outcomes will naturally differ. Partly mosaic, partly blurred and partly fused, our aim is to establish ‘terms of reference’ towards a working and systemic basis for appropriate consensus. This is a precursor to specific, context-bound studies that still need to be undertaken, such as when commercial decision-making needs specific market information, or to reliably establish a critical point. We present representative studies to indicate both pragmatic modes and disciplinary research directions, but these are best considered as sketches or essays suggesting designs and patterns in a larger composition.

The project from which this book developed, entitled ‘Branding Cities on the West Pacific Rim’, began life when an interdisciplinary ‘technology and culture’ research group responded to the call for academics to combine skills and expertise in addressing cross-disciplinary questions, and to seek seeding grants to fund their research. The ‘technology and culture’ grouping gave rise to dialogue between cultural theorists, new media theorists, psychologists and a research group specializing in electronic business and digital technologies. Perhaps an unlikely combination, but it did produce some understanding of how disciplines differ, why they must differ in order to answer the problems that they find in the world, and how occasional strategic partnerships help researchers to achieve intellectual and pragmatic growth. The questions asked and answered in such circumstances may be neither more nor less pressing than those asked within the bounds of accepted disciplinary structures, but the difficulties that arise oblige the researchers involved to re-examine their practices, differentiate their expectations and acknowledge their weaknesses.

In our case we discovered first that we were interested in the ways in which online transactions and marketing were capable of transforming everyday experience. In particular, we asked how the destination-image in tourism marketing addressed the affective sensibilities of a prospective tourist, and whether this was qualitatively different from the address of other powerful media which also use locations, for example film. Interviews with tourism officials in Hong Kong persuaded us that global cities – already a serious topic for filmmakers and film theorists – would provide the situated depth of visuality that we sought. These preliminary discussions were followed up with a presentation to the then HK Tourism Commissioner, Rebecca Lai, on the greening of Hong Kong. We emphasized the theoretical value of the ‘idea of the city’ in suggesting new versions of the urban experience – for instance, ‘greening’ – to the underlying structures of attention embedded in residents’ experience of the place itself, and that should include a sensitivity to the cinematic image.

Given the triple focus at the core of the investigation (cinema and tourism and the branded city), this project required that we find ways of explaining our aims not only to ourselves and our research team, but also to a wide range of interviewees and focus-group participants. The methods that we chose in order to collect data often involved sharing various sorts of information with the participants, in a process of shared mental mapping. The model is similar to that used by art historian James Elkins, who uses intuitive maps in order to analyse the production of history. These ‘unguarded and informal’ maps (2002, p. 11) help him to elicit information from students and professional colleagues, who are asked to ‘draw’ the history of art and to represent themselves somewhere in the drawing. He does not claim that this technique produces a polished version of art history, but rather an ‘insight … into the necessity of thinking about the shape of your imagination’ (p. 11). The maps that we have elicited from participants are verbal, free-form interviews that invite people with varying types of local expertise to enunciate their idea of the city through a particular medium, cinematic or touristic. Our role is to translate the ‘shape of their imagination’ into diagrammatic and discursive representations for dissemination to academics, students and the parties themselves.

The placing of the speaker in the mapping conversations, however, was no simple matter for us. Film professionals would talk about their own films and those of directors they admired, but then, by requiring that we also discuss our work and our perceptions of the city in which we were ‘outsiders’, they would oblige us to reveal ourselves as cast in the roles of incidental voyeurs and tourists. We used the suggestions of all film-oriented interviewees (professionals) to guide our selection of films for further analysis, and to select audience groups. The research team was thus collaborating at every stage of the work with participants as well as with one another, ‘a way of listening to people and learning from them’ (Morgan 1998, p. 9, quoted by Madriz 2000, p. 835). Tourism managers and urban planners also addressed us as potential tourists at some stage of the interview, advising us on routes and special activities that would allow us to ‘see’ the city, be it Sydney, Hong Kong or Shanghai, more effectively. In the case of Sydney, this was easily achieved, as the offices looked out over the Harbour! In Hong Kong, one of our interviewees (the Deputy Tourism Commissioner) became our interrogator, asking whether we had children, checking on our nationality, enquiring what purchases we needed to make before returning home, and whether we had good walking shoes and stamina! Only then did he deliver a suggested schedule for our free time. The same role reversal in potential interview situations took place with filmmakers and critics. In Hong Kong in 2003, an invitation to the Hong Kong Film Critics Society annual dinner turned into a conversation about contemporary Hong Kong and Australian films, hosted by HKFC and where we were expected to produce insider interpretations of recent Australian films, such as Philip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).3 Once again, we found ourselves both guests and interlocutors at that event. We were also fortunate to have access, both direct and indirect, to senior city marketers and branding teams in each of the three cities, all of whom were both candid and generous with their time. Although our academic responsibility implies that we shall have critical things to say, the common purpose was sympathetically understood. The normal process of settling an interviewee and establishing a commonality between interlocutors involved information-sharing and role assignment – as Esther Madriz writes, ‘[E]stablishing rapport with the participants is key to eliciting high quality information’ (2000, p. 845) – but in many instances it was a more extensive practice, requiring the researchers themselves to be cast as tourists and observers by the interviewees. We have taken from these encounters a permission to enter ourselves as collaborators in the narratives that unfold in these conversations. We also take from this that there is a tendency amongst professionals to place us within the body of their work – the city – and urban representations in cinema. It also appears that they are taking a phenomenological approach to their work, which supports our hypothesis that the idea of the city is founded and maintained by means of structures of attention that are closely associated with many aspects of daily interaction with other people, and with media sources. This in turn supports the underlying questions, which derive from a phenomenological approach to cinematic reception: relating experience of a particular city to the experience of watching a specific film and the implications of this for other forms of city engagement, particularly, but not exclusively, touristic.

In structuring our meetings with respondents, we have, therefore, used textual, visual and cinematic elicitation (film extracts, stories and postcards); occupation-specific focus groups (cinematographers, urban planners, audience members, backpackers); extended administered questionnaires (senior strategists and directors), location-based surveys (street interviews), and we have backed this data up with image-based content and cluster analysis, participant observation and concept mapping.

The development of ideas throughout the life of the project derives in part from the need to translate disciplinary perspectives into a common language, and eventually to work towards a transferable discourse. We argue here that this attempt has two possible coterminous effects. The deliberate transfer of ideas and terminologies across disciplines allows us to test the limits of familiar jargon, and to make vocabulary breach complex meanings. It also reduces the meaning of the ideas and the words used to something less useful in the disciplinary application. So, although we do produce some complex maps, using words and free drawing, we also try to codify associative talk by means of diagrams adapted from data-modelling systems used in information systems. Although often the activity of modelling produces insight but the model itself is superfluous, one of the hardest parts of this kind of data collection is judging whether simplicity or reduction, development or bastardization is in play, and at what point of the collaboration.

In exploring collaborative discourse, this chapter discusses and illustrates some of the methodological ideas that we have employed in researching this book, focussing mainly on the first case study, Hong Kong. We first give a brief summary of our findings, expressed in terms that we hope are intelligible across disciplines. We then introduce the parameters of data analysis and design that have been drawn directly from disciplines other than cultural research. We test these models with reference to results that we understand as cultural and historical insights, rather than as proven quantitative information. Finally, we return to the source of our enquiry, the cinematic phenomenology of touristic experience in the city, to evaluate what we have learned and what ways of expressing that knowledge have become available to us through collaboration.

Branding History

One of our first core findings is that local historical memory and the cultural narratives that sustain such remembrance are of interest to tourism strategists. In Hong Kong, there are place-histories which may come closer to retrieving the character of the city in the long term than either the outworn tag of ‘East meets West’ or the ambitious claims of ‘Asia’s Global City’. In 2003 we found that interviewees were anxious to articulate, on film and in theatre, but also in conversation, a history of Hong Kong which would remember its Chineseness without forgetting its radicalism, its internationalism and its suffering. So, in 2003, and in the wake of the SARS epidemic, the 1:99 series of short films, which had been sponsored by the Tourism Commission and the Hong Kong Film Directors Association, memorialized the bravery of Hong Kong residents in the context of a series of challenges stretching from the Japanese invasion (1941), through Typhoon Wanda (1962), the demonstrations of 1968, cholera, drought and SARS. In these films, the history of Hong Kong is removed from external interests, the discussion of British or Chinese sovereignty, and reinstated as an experiential trajectory for residents. Also in 2003, there were retrospectives of key early-twentieth-century Cantonese filmmakers Law Dun and Lai Man-Wai, and a theatre production extolling Lai (1893–1953) as the (Cantonese) father of Chinese film. Born in Guangdong, Lai studied in Hong Kong and moved frequently between the two centres in response to the vagaries of war in the first half of the last century. In so doing he became part of the establishment of Hong Kong as an alternative filmmaking space for Chinese talent. The same exodus occurred after 1949, when many Shanghai-based filmmakers migrated south. The 110th-anniversary production is a celebration of Lai himself, but also indicative of Hong Kong in 2003 as a place with a will to control its historical narrative.

We question, however, whether these ‘thick’ histories are sufficiently respected and communicated both to the residents and the visitors by tourism initiatives, and we suggest that 1990s brand identity might be better served in the twenty-first century by a pluralistic approach to urban identity on the Rim. For the brand designers, branding the city encompasses an articulation of corporate identity, in which urban space performs place as though it were an extremely large and complex company interest. A strategic brand platform has five core aims: an immediate recognition by the market, an attractive proposition for the market, a statement of sustainable difference from other products (here, places), long-term viability, and positive susceptibility to various aspects of development (Temporal 2000, p. 51). Translating those strategies to place branding, we can argue that historical depth is crucial. Places are differentiated not only by their physical forms and architectures, but also by the contexts of their construction and development, by the known experiences of usage and by the currency of the memories which attach to them. Arguably, the maintenance of cultural memory will sustain and transfigure the tests of the present by re-appropriating the spaces created by ‘aspects of development’ for use by residents. Thus, while ‘East meets West’ might have been immediately recognizable up until 1997 as a brand for Hong Kong the ex-British colony, now the city has to be ‘pitched’ to Mainland Chinese visitors as ‘China meets the World’ – even though neither slogan fully captures the complexity of emotions with which Hong Kong residents negotiate their Chinese and Hong Kong identities. Such complexity is occasionally captured on film. In Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung play two lovers, Fleur and the 12th Master, who find themselves trapped in sediments of time by the betrayal of the 12th Master, when he fails to honour a joint suicide pact they have made in the 1930s. The film follows Fleur, as, 50 years later and now a ghost, she searches for her past in the morass of modern development that has stifled its memory. When she finally meets the now aged 12^th Master, he is a great disappointment, a man who has failed to live up to the romantic and nostalgic standards of pre-war glamour. This is a text in which Hong Kong is succinctly summarized as a cluttered space, where histories jostle for physical expression and where the present literally topples the sites of the past. Although generically a ghost film, by presenting the past as a walking inhabitant in the present, Rouge also presents its audience with their own everyday experience of Hong Kong. Kwan’s achievement challenges the filmmaker; as it does the researcher and the branding expert, to capture the layered histories of the city, as a space, a destination and a location, and as immanent in the experience of those who work and live there. Above all, it is vital that the film itself not disappoint, but rather present disappointment as itself a poignancy of maturity. Mui and Cheung both died tragically in 2004, while we were researching this book, she of cancer and he by his own hand. Kwan’s film immediately became even more of a palimpsest of the city it portrays.

Research Models in Translation

From several literatures outside those of cultural studies it is clear that methods, and the results to which those methods lead, have different values, objectives and interpretations, even when using similar categories and constructs.4 For example, the intellectual origins of marketing derive largely from mid-twentieth-century US empiricist psychology and it remains strongly associated with a pragmatic ethos of quantified measurement categories and definition-seeking. Tourism, too, is often viewed as a market-focussed application area, or else an instrument for economic development. While a weighty critical literature may be found in both these disciplines, their pragmatic, particularly economic, imperatives still dominate research motivations and trajectories. Since branding is viewed as a strategic equity, and our current understanding of city competition is largely predicated on business models derived from corporates, these disciplines supply numerous methods whereby we can access the knowledge structures that reflect rational ap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: An Argument for the Cinematic City
• 1 A Discussion of Method
• 2 Branding the City
• 3 Structures of Attention and the ‘City of Life’ (Hong Kong)
• 4 Flatlands Revisited
• 5 Chromatic Contours
• 6 Shanghai: World City?
• 7 The Future of City Branding
• References
• Filmography
• Index