Abstract
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The brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors. In order to help customers organize their knowledge about products and services in a way that clarifies their decision making, it is inevitable to ‘brand’ those products and/or services. As for Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, the branding is therefore “endowing products and services with the power of a brand”. The branding is not a simple act, rather the result of building the added value endowed on products and services, i. e. building the brand equity.
The paper reflects on some problems relating to the practice of city branding in Hungary as exemplified by the biggest Hungarian cities (officially: ‘the cities with county rights’), particularly regarding the city branding practices of the local governments. In the first part of the paper, we try to catalogue the brands of the cities in this topic setting out from the so called brand elements (i.e. the devices which identify and differentiate the brands). The primordial sources of this first part will be the different representations of the brands (logos, slogans etc.) either visual or textual. In the second part of the paper, we try to outline the brand building processes behind the various brands. In this context, we distinguish three criteria making the brand building process successful such as the criteria ‘memorable’ (How easily do consumers recall and recognize the brand elements/brands?), ’meaningful’ (Are the brand elements/brands credible?) and ‘likable’ (How aesthetically appealing are the brand elements/brands?). As for the criterion ‘meaningful’, the expression ‘credibility’ draws our attention to the fact that the successful branding process is almost impossible without a correspondence between the brand and the objective performance of the city. In order to specify the objective performance of the city, we will also mobilize several sources such as statistical data, local development documents etc.
If a correspondence can be detected between the brand and the objective performance of the city, we will turn our attention to the criteria ‘memorable’ and ‘likable’. In other words, we try to scrutinize how to communicate – or rather: how to should communicate – the objective performance (and its results: the objective values) of the city towards the target audiences. If this correspondence is failed, the gap between the brand and the objective performance can be meant that
(a) brand is more memorable/likable than it would be justifiable as compared with the objective performance of the city;
or
(b) brand is underachieving as compared with the objective performance of the city.
In the case of (a), an unrealistic brands can be led to the customers’ disappointment in the long run. This is because city brand building processes are not identifiable with marketing communication activities, and – in the course of building brand equity – it should develop the objective performance of the city as well. In the case of (b), the most important task is to make the brands more ‘memorable’ and ‘likable’ – satisfying with a defensive strategy in the scope of the city’s objective performance.
Keywords:
city marketing, city branding, local development policies
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