Online Place Branding

The Case of Hong Kong

Phoenix Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429816468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Through an interdisciplinary approach combining the concepts, methods and tools in language and discourse studies and insights from marketing and tourism research, this book examines the online place branding of Hong Kong, one of the most visited cities and well-known spots in the world.

The book compares how the place brand is officially constructed and conveyed by the institutional bodies, as realised on the Brand Hong Kong website online, with how the place brand is publicly experienced and perceived by individuals around the world, as realised on the TripAdvisor Hong Kong travel forum online. The book also includes comparative analysis between Singapore and Hong Kong to provide better understanding of online place branding and findings from the comparative study identify interesting similarities and differences between the official portrayal of the place brand of Hong Kong and its public perception in the digital realm, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore in online place branding. The book also offers evidence-based suggestions on how we can bridge the gap between the online representation and perception of a place brand and how to enhance online place branding in general.

1 Introduction

Overview

From Amsterdam to Zanzibar, the practice of place branding can be observed all over the world. Cities, regions and states, of varying sizes and scales, all engage in this global race to mark their place on the international stage. While place branding is by no means a recent phenomenon, its growth in scope and reach has been amplified exponentially in the digital age in the last two decades. Accompanying this expansion in practice is an increase in scholarly interest, which has led to the emergence of place branding as an academic field of study in its own right. With this accumulation of knowledge in both practice and theory, a unique opportunity now aptly arises to review the state of the art of the field, to understand the impact of the Internet on place branding and to conduct a detailed case study of online place branding on one of the most well-known spots on the map of the world.

With an analytic focus on Hong Kong, this monograph presents a fresh perspective on the subject of place branding in four ways through a study investigating its online realisation, comparing its dimensions of official portrayal and public perceptions, approaching it chiefly from a linguistic point of view and dealing with a leading world city which has not been examined in depth before. In this first chapter and the second chapter, these four aspects, which together differentiate this monograph from previous works, will be duly highlighted. To begin with, this chapter first provides a brief introduction to the relevant key concepts and the site of study, with particular emphasis on their origin, history and practical real-world importance. A general overview of the book then follows, which outlines the overall structure of the study.

1.1 Branding

To differentiate, indeed, is at the heart of branding. According to the Merriam- Webster Dictionary (2019), the first known use of the word “brand” was recorded before the 12th century, when it was used as a noun to refer to a charred piece of wood. It was not until the 15th century that the verb meaning of the word – “to mark with a burning piece of wood” – first appeared. While the word itself is less than a millennium old, the practice of making a mark in order to declare ownership of property such as livestock and slaves and to indicate the status of the marked item perhaps has a much longer history, which can be traced back to the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans (Bastos & Levy, 2012). Over time, the notion of branding has evolved to apply not only to the animate entities of animals and people for the purpose of differentiating one’s possession from others’, but also to the inanimate items of marketable goods for the sake of differentiating one’s products from others’. At the end of the 19th century, branding started to be applied to consumer goods such as Quaker oats and Gillette razors as a business tool for product identification (Low & Fullerton, 1994). In contemporary society, it is this latter sense of branding which dominates, as the word is almost exclusively used as a marketing term. The ubiquity of branding is evident in our day-to-day experience, as hardly a day goes by without us being exposed to brands – from the moment we wake up by the alarm on our mobile phone to the toothpaste we use and the coffee we drink in the morning – all of these everyday commodities and so many more that we interact with are examples of brands. The power of branding can also be seen through the economic value of successful brands. As some of the most recognisable household names around the globe, large technology companies including Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are each estimated to be worth over US$100 million in brand value (Interbrand, 2019). The prominence of these technological giants as the world’s biggest brands not only underlines the omnipresence of the Internet but also shows the growing extension of branding from individual concrete goods and products to collective and complex corporates as well as abstract services and experiences in a world which has become increasingly virtual and intangible.

1.2 Place branding

One of the more complex and abstract entities which have been transformed into marketable commodities through branding in the modern age is place. Covering geographical locations large and small, place branding involves turning a mere point on the map into a distinguishable spot with identifiable values and experiences. The need to brand a place arises from the increasingly intense competition among places for resources around the world. In contemporary society where globalisation has brought about fierce competition between countries, corporations and individuals, the need to make one unique and recognisable, in order to be more “saleable”, is stronger than ever. Branding has therefore extended its scope from the realms of products, services and corporates to the geographical locations of nations, regions and cities.

The history of place branding practice can be discussed in relation to its precursors – place promotion and place marketing. The promotion of urban places can be traced back to the 19th century, particularly in former industrial cities in Europe and the United States such as Glasgow and New York, respectively (Ward, 1998), when individual intuitive promotional activities randomly conducted by different parties taking an interest in a place were observed (Kavaratzis, 2008). More integrated systematic attempts to market a place have only emerged around a hundred years later at the end of the 20th century (Kotler, Asplund, Rein, & Heider, 1999). In place marketing, the focus is often on temporary advertising events targeting consumers, notably outside visitors and investors. By contrast, the more recent practice of place branding which has developed over the last two decades places an emphasis on all-round sustainable place brand development involving both external and internal stakeholders such as local residents, workers and businesses. If engineered successfully, a strong and mature brand has the power of making the reputation of a place largely immune to negative influences, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, as a positive impression has already been firmly established (Anholt, 2006). It can also create and sustain a strong bond within a community to enhance their sense of belonging to a place.

One prime example of place marketing which received remarkable success is the “I Love New York” campaign in 1977. Set against the background of a New York plagued by fiscal, social, safety and hygiene problems, the advertising campaign was symbolised by its iconic I ♥ NY logo and executed through a theme song in television commercials and memorabilia such as T-shirts and buttons. Initially launched only as a short-term tourism marketing drive instead of a full-fledged branding programme, the campaign nonetheless gave the metropolis a complete image makeover, drew visitors back to the Big Apple and helped to revive the city’s status as a financial and business hub. In fact, the campaign was so successful that the slogan and its associated line of souvenirs are still in use to promote New York today.

Around the turn of this millennium, a number of early examples of place brands started to come into existence, particularly in Europe where place branding practice has been, and continues to be, among the most active. In 2005, for example, it was found from a questionnaire based on 28 responses from 12 European countries that the average per capita budget assigned for city branding was €400,000 per city, with a range from £130,000 to €10 million per year (Seisdedos, 2006). Apart from the growing amount of investment injected into place branding projects, the boom of the place branding industry was also evident through the rising number of projects, as many European cities including Barcelona (2003), Lyon (2007), Berlin (2008) and Vienna (2009) embarked on their branding journey in the first decade of this century. One of the first European city brands which have enjoyed considerable success is Amsterdam. Similar to New York in the 1970s, Amsterdam experienced a period of crisis at the end of the last century as the city was battered by an image of drugs, sex, low-priced alcohol and anti-social behaviour which tarnished its reputation as a cultural centre. The “I-AMsterdam” branding project, launched in 2004, aimed at improving the image of the city to attract a greater variety of visitors. At the same time, its slogan and overall bottom-up branding approach also highlighted the inclusive, participatory nature of the project in inviting and enlisting the collaboration and engagement of all the communities associated with the brand (Kavaratzis, 2008). As such, the resulting brand was not only relevant to visitors but also to locals. To this day, the “I-AMsterdam” branding initiative remains firmly cemented in people’s mind after its first introduction 17 years ago, as it continues to form part of Amsterdam’s branding efforts in its updated version.

1.3 Online place branding

Just as place branding practice began to gain momentum across Europe at the dawn of the 21st century, a technological invention also took the world by storm in the same period. The Internet, initially originated as a network of computers for universities in the 1960s, started to become more accessible outside the academic circles after the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989 and its subsequent release to the public a couple of years later. In less than a decade’s time, the Internet was widely used, as browsers and websites became part of the common vocabulary. With the transition into a new millennium, the online world experienced yet another significant change, whereby the web evolved from its first stage to the second. While Web 1.0 was characterised by static, graphically simple web pages unilaterally communicated from experts to end users, Web 2.0 offers dynamic, interactive multimedia content collaboratively created by users. The meteoric rise of search engines, social media platforms and media sharing sites in the first decade of the 21st century, facilitated by the substantial improvements in server performance and bandwidth, meant that access to information and individuals online has never been easier, faster or greater. With the ubiquitous use of such mobile devices as smartphones and tablet computers, we have now come to a digital era when the Internet is not only mainstream but indispensable in our everyday life.

This contemporary revolutionary development of the web has inevitably brought both challenges and opportunities to place branding. On the one hand, the web makes it more challenging for those who manage a brand to exert control given the proliferation of promotion and communication channels available (Florek, 2011; Zavattaro & Fay, 2018). Through the use of such channels, users can participate not only in the reception but also in the creation and sharing of messages, making it impossible for brand managers to completely remove negative messages or to estimate the size and composition of its audience. On the other hand, these channels also open the door for brand managers to have strong, direct and multidimensional online engagement with stakeholders of a brand on a scale scarcely imaginable in the past (Florek, 2011; Kavaratzis, 2012), allowing the brand to reach out to those interested in the brand to participate more easily, quickly and inexpensively. A notable example of online place branding which has triumphantly capitalised on this opportunity that the web offers is Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign. Launched in 2009, this award-winning project came up with the ingenious idea of advertising a six-month position of island caretaker for the Great Barrier Reef on newspapers worldwide and inviting job seekers to submit their applications through the campaign website. On the first day of its launch, the website already reached a phenomenon hit rate of 200,000 hits in 24 hours (Tourism & Events Queensland, 2019). In total, it received approximately 8.6 million visits and 55 million page views (Tourism & Events Queensland, 2019). After months of continued interest, eventually over 35,000 applications from more than 200 countries were received, with 16 finalists interviewed and one winner appointed. By the end of the campaign, more than AU$430 million (US$296 million) in estimated global publicity value was generated for Queensland’s tourism body (Tourism & Events Queensland, 2019) from only US$1 million of investment (BBC, 2009). While the campaign’s targets were chiefly tourists, it has nonetheless demonstrated the tremendous power of the online world on place branding.

1.4 Hong Kong

As a coastal city with a natural deepwater harbour in Asia, Hong Kong is located at the south-eastern tip of China. With a population of approximately 7.4 million people on a total land area of 1,106 square kilometres (Hong Kong Government, 2019), Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. Characterised by a distinct topography composed mainly of steep slopes, only about a quarter of that total land area has been developed. In this city which has the world’s highest number of skyscrapers (The Skyscraper Center, 2019), almost 90% of the population live in high-rise buildings (Wang & Lau, 2013). Despite this iconic image as a concrete jungle wh...