چکیده:
Cities are in search for new ways to get promoted. Regarding the fast changes in technology and the shift from local to a globalized environment, cities are forced to compete with each other in order to become an attractive tourist destination, workplace, cultural rich place and much more. City branding has been introduced as a new and creative solution to be adopted by cities to achieve success in this hard competition. Although the promotion of cities dates back to the 19th century, the emergence of concepts such as place marketing, place branding, and city branding is relatively new in the academic language. City branding is not only a promotional activity but also it should be considered as a strategic process. So, city branding should be a vision-driven process in order to be successful. But unfortunately, there is a gap in strategic city branding literature from the practical point of view. This study focuses on filling this gap by reviewing the evolution of city branding from city marketing, identifying the relations between city branding and strategic spatial planning and then examining the lessons learned in the case study of Damavand city near Tehran. Thus, Damavand strategic city branding process is explained step by step in this article, as to create an applicable framework for other Iranian cities like Damavand which have great branding potentials. This strategic process led to identifying Damavand’s branding vision as “A Mythical Paradise”, and also proposing 42 different city branding plans for Damavand
خلاصه ماشینی:
The concept of city Branding, previously known as city marketing (see Kavaratzis, 2004), refers to the process of applying product branding practices to cities, targeting city’s competitive advantages through city’s unique characteristics and identity or city image which is called city brand in marketing literature (Kavaratzis, 2007; Zhang & Zhao, 2009).
The entrepreneurs of "City Branding" studies, indicated that it is not only a promotional activity but also that it should be considered as a strategic process (Ashworth & Voogd, 1990, 1994; Kotler et al.
, 2013; Sinaee, 2013; Moghadam, 2014); so, this article tries to create a framework for strategic city branding for Damavand City according to Iranian planning conditions.
Subsequently, Damavand city is studied as a case to practice the lessons learned in literature review and also develop a framework for strategic city branding that other urban planners can follow.
This part of the work is carried out through field studies, observation visits, interviews, and the use of various urban development plans to clarify a clear roadmap for strategic city branding.
, (see Lucarelli & Berg, 2011; Kavaratzis, 2012; Zenker & Rütter, 2014); then as these notions got popularity among scholars, the relations between city branding, city marketing and other phenomena like creative cities or cultural urban regeneration were also studied.
Last but not the least, is the studies conducted on branding visions and the place of city branding in strategic spatial planning.