City Branding

CITY BRANDING AND NEW MEDIA

Place branding→ process and practice by which places acquire a new, improved identity by adding measurable economic, social and cultural value to their name.

Place branding could be broadly defined as the use of marketing strategies in the promotion of localities to enhance their reputation in order to attract residents, tourism and investments.

City Branding→ set of representational processes mediated by linguistic, discursive and semiotic practices that construct a city's competitive identity according to criteria of inclusion, exclusion, selection and emphasis of information. You have to make a choice of which information you want to use and you have to show your results. Thanks to the new media it has evolved: From a simple application of marketing techniques to potential tourist destinations into an important tool of web governance which is in the hand of public administration.

The intent is acquiring multiple citizens.

Engages in constant communication.

with citizens.

oHardware of a place its geography, its environment and the industries thatenvironment lent itself to offer.

Software of a place is defined by the experiences you know the culture, thepeople that are living within that place.

Strategic positioning marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy adistinct position, relative to competing brands in the mind of the customer.Companies apply this strategy either by emphasizing the distinguishing featuresof their brand or the try to create a suitable image. It is also called ‘productpositioning’’ because once a brand is positioned it is very difficult to reposition itwithout destroying its credibility.

Website of Manchester City Council

It’s top 20 digital cities by 2020 and has the potential to become one of Europe’smost important digital centers. It’s the second largest digital cluster in Europe,after London. Original Modern is the brand vision for the Manchester City Region.City

websites have therefore become a necessary strategic tool in a city's brand development, communication agenda and urban governance. The most characteristic case is provided by official tourism websites that are regularly referred to in the tourism section of municipal websites, so that, for example, users from MCC are invited to access Visit Manchester. The Manchester city council homepage MCC has a 'gov.uk' domain, tailored by the common objective of the central government and local administrations to harmonize a network of e-services and make them accessible to all citizens. Among recurrent linguistic choices we can find a marked use of the interpersonal function of language, realized through imperative sentences and questions and frequent recourse to the pronoun you and the possessives your and yours. The top of the homepage is identifiable by a minimalist three-colour scheme made up of black, white and red. This 'language of colour' recalls GOV.UK, the portal to

public service information from the government, characterized by an essential design and black, white and blue brand colours. Following this trend in slightly different combinations, the black-white-red colour scheme of the MCC site acts as a consistent marker of identity and a cohesive device and contributes as a result to projecting a strong and recognizable city brand. While the base layer is made up of the standard repertoire of logo, icons, images, captions and subheads.

The first visual element of the page design that captures the user's attention is the horizontal frame of the masthead. It carries the city logo, Manchester's heraldic coat of arms, which is symmetrically mirrored in the bottom toolbar. Below the masthead, three main horizontal bands of content can be identified:

The top one is dedicated to the range of offered e-services, each indicated by a specific icon.

The middle one is characterized by a full-width photo gallery 'to create emotion and impact'.

with links to news and events. The bottom one is defined by two customized search boxes (‘Your Neighborhood’ and ‘Your Account’) and links to social media (Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and Flickr), the icons are organized into five rows that correspond to different e-services named in the captions and partially described in the subheads:

1. The first row, endowed with greater salience and visually marked by a dark grey background, contains four icons, each with a caption and a subhead.
2. The four rows below, displayed against a white background contain five icons each.

The photo gallery, center-page, is made up of large pictures of rather heterogeneous subjects, illustrating the council’s news section.

Methodological remarks and data set:

Websites are page-based documents that assemble a variety of modes and discourses in order to create meaning. ‘the application of linguistic frames of analysis to multimodal artefacts is in fact neither self-evident nor obviously correct’.

This choice mostly depends on the fact that Multimodal. MultimodalAnalysis and Genre Analysis are two methodologies that help study the online representation of cities: Visual/verbal signs Discursive strategies Intersemiotic systems Formal structures Effects Multimodal Analysis I. Websites assemble a variety of modes and discourses into a hybrid genreMultimodal Analysis. II. Multimodality applied to digital genre characterizing the semiotic features and meaning-making potential of websites considering the social functions they perform III. It proves suitable because it is a hybrid and holistic approach that considers words, pictures, design features, navigational and narrative strategies order, flow and hierarchy of both visual and written elements and statements on cultural issues (values and opinions regarding gender, class, race, religion) Genre analysis I. The aim is to go beyond common intuitive perceptions in order to establish a credible connection between the elicitation and

Interpretation of multimodal features on a given website and the recognition that these same features are semiotically 'overcoded', that is, repetitive and predictable.

II. Redundancy facilitates interpretation towards preferred meanings

III. Dynamic, changeable genre

Genre and Multimodality (GeM) model also used as a framework to annotate complex document layout, creating digital corpora and analyzing them.

Template for government sites: minimalist three-colour scheme recalling GOV.UK, the portal to public service information from the government projecting a strong and recognisable city brand layout layer: spatial placement of base units in the visual make-up of the multimodal document.

E-Governance on the Web: Linguistic and Discursive Strategies

Smart cities should be in constant interaction with people, their practices and everyday routines thanks to state-of-the-art Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which includes free public Wi-Fi, geospatial tools and smartphones.

In practice, opening and maintaining new communication channels with citizens is still a challenge for several local councils. The future will be mobile, but 'geography matters as much as ever, despite the digital revolution'. All this will be especially good for the growing numbers of city-dwellers. Even the devices in use today are already producing huge amounts of data. Most of these data are, and will continue to be, generated in cities, because that is where the phones, cars, buildings and infrastructure to which they relate are concentrated. If those data are combined and analysed, they will make cities better places to live. The so-called 'smart city discourse' is not exempt from these ambiguities, as 'smart mentality' could be regarded as a disciplinary strategy for two main reasons: The first is that, together with the ideal type of the smart city, specific objectives, strategies, ideologies and political choices may be presented as‘natural’ and ‘univocal’ approaches. The second danger is that urban visioning is increasingly reduced to a
single technology-centric vision of the city of the future.
A final parameter of good e-governance is a conspicuous commitment not only to customer satisfaction (measured by questionnaires, polls or website satisfaction surveys which often open up while linking to the city website), but also to citizens’ feedback, comments and complaints in local blogs and forums.
Data set and methodology
The data set includes the civic websites of the nine largest British cities retrieved from the independent City Mayors website – Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Manchester and Bristol. Access to the city council websites showed two recurrent presentational choices in the selected data set:
- The first is that ‘community’ regularly appears among the listed entries.
- The second that cultural difference/culturalluded in its definition the concept of "inheritance" implies that it encompasses a wide range of places, artifacts, and practices that hold historical, artistic, and ethnological significance. It is a result of natural, historic, and cultural peculiarities. Heritage is not just an object of social policies, cultural practices, and media interactions, but also a subject of discourse within the heritage industry and heritage politics. The heritage industry, rooted in the tourism industry, aims to promote and preserve heritage for commercial purposes. On the other hand, heritage politics views heritage as a public and collective resource, emphasizing its importance for the community. These two discourses, although related to heritage, are shaped by different value systems and do not necessarily align. They represent different perspectives and approaches to heritage, highlighting the complexity and diversity of its interpretation and management. It is important to note that the definition and understanding of heritage are constantly evolving and subject to ongoing debates and discussions. The inclusion of various perspectives and voices is crucial in shaping a comprehensive and inclusive understanding of heritage.