Brand, Identity and Reputation: Exploring, Creating New Realities ...

creates add-on value for all the brands involved. However, part of the literature on place branding maintains that a positive addon
value for every participant of the process is not always the case (Evans, 2003; Richards & Wilson, 2004; Smith, 2005). Cobranding
for places thus maintains that place ―brand equity‖ could also turn negative or uneven and the added value for the
participants is not likely to be the norm.
One of the main reasons is linked to the diverse characteristics of places and corporations as well as the diverse characteristics of
place brands and corporate, service and product brands. In this sense, it could argued that not only is it important to be cautious
in dealing with place branding, but also that by studying place brands it automatically broadens the concept of brand as known in
branding and marketing literature. Places thus can and should be seen as brands only if one depart from the traditional way of
conceptualizing a brand, namely in its corporate, service and product form. Much of the literature, as pointed out in different
ways by Pasquinelli(2010) and Lucarelli(2011), adopting those approaches and theories renders a static rather than a dynamic
understanding of place brands. The dynamic understanding of place branding argues that place brands are something very
complex and difficult to catch and measure, but also that it is almost unimportant to try to understand and discover the essence of
the brand, because of its contingency in the particular spatial-temporal context. The extent to which place brands are seen as
dynamic processes differs in the place-branding literature (Doel & Hubbard, 2002; Giovanardi, 2011; Hankinson, 2004;
Pasquinelli, 2010; Pryor & Grossbart, 2007). According to the dynamic-appropriative perspective thus, place brads are a political
and aesthetic on-going multi-layered spatial and timely contextual process in which multi-leveled interactions are processed
among brands in form of different types of audiences.
Methodology
The study tends to build an alternative conceptual understanding of place brand and its manifestations. For this purpose, the
historical Italian region of Romagna (Balzani, 2001) is analyzed in order to get a deeper and wider understanding of the
phenomena included in a singular setting (Yin, 2003) and to be able to apply the framework to other cases in a comparative
manner. In this paper, the interactions of the various regional brand organizations and the general brand ―Romagna‖ are
examined by studying the way several regional brands are interacting. The study is based firstly on an analysis of organization
websites and secondly on four open-ended face-to-face interviews with key persons of various regional organizations. The
choice of interviewee follows a simple rule: the organization must have purposefully endowed the regional brand and the person
interviewed is the key person. By focusing only on key persons, important information about other modalities and reasons spread
at other levels inside and outside the organization is missed. In spite of this, it can be argued that 1) we are now not interested in
researching relationships at grassroots level of place branding; 2) the particular hierarchical cultural context in which the study is
performed allows us to believe the key speakers are ideal for our scope; and 3) since our understanding of brand is a purposive
embodiment, the organizations selected are the ones that purposefully appropriate the brand.
Conclusions
The paper offers a theoretical framework that conceptualizes place brands and their manifestations as being constitutive of
different brands engaged across spatio-temporal interactions in relation to each other and in relation to a particular contextual
environment. The way of interaction, motivations, intentionality and relational modalities though which different brands are
engaged are characterized by political, spatial and meaning factors. The contextual environment can be seen as a (co-branding)
process in a constant dynamic on-going process state of flux in which different types of brands are interplaying, constructing the
place brandscapes. The paper further elucidates that by thinking of place brand and place branding as a co-branding process
based on mutual reciprocity between and among different types of brands located in a particular brandscape allows researchers
and practitioners to better understand the characteristics of the place brand, its activities, efforts and elements and the conditions
under which these activities, efforts and element are constituted. However, the type of co-branding process described in this
study does not necessarily create a linear positive add-on value for all parts involved. Rather, the co-branding process here is
fragmented, dynamic, and multi-contextual. Instead of being considered a fixed regional brand, Romagna should be considered a
regional space with several brands acting within the regional brandscape, because of the several brands and actors relating to it
for their own different purposes.
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