City Brand Positioning From The Perspective Of Customer Perception And Competition

Brand is brought into being because of competition and it is very important in competition.The successful brand is to build strong links between brand identity and the needs of potential customers.There are prominent competition between cities too to gain investment, tourism and inhabitants. Like product brand, city brands can also satisfy people's functional, symbolic and emotional needs. City brands can help the city customers perceive the unique advantage of the city in comparison with its competitors. However, many governments build city brand according to the resource endowment advantage of the city. In this way, cities without any resource endowment or with exactly the same resource endowment can not create unique brand positioning. After comprehensive literature review, this study aims to build the city brand positioning from the perspective of customer (tourists, residents, investors, etc.) perception and competition with the example of the eight cities in Yangtze Delta region.This paper has three main parts: First, the city brand positioning model. This study raised the customer perception and competition perspective and refers to the methodologies in destination image research. As a result a new brand positioning model is established. Second, empirical research. The paper takes eight cities in Yangtze River Delta region as the case cities, takes investors and tourists as the main target customers, and practiced the methods in the above mentioned brand positioning model. Third, data analysis and corresponding proposals. The paper uses quantitative methods such as exploratory factor analysis, factor analytical importance-performance analysis, correlation analysis, structural equation model analysis to identify key factors in brand positioning, and uses 0-1 programming to determine the final position from the perspective of competition. And the author makes recommendations for the master brand positioning based on the results of quantitative analysis for the eight case cities.The main results of the paper are as below: First, the author raises the city brand positioning model from the perspective of customer perception and competition. Second, the author conducts empirical study to support this model and generates the importance-performance analysis figure, the 6 positioning factors to attract tourists and 5 positioning factors to attract investors and the weight of each factor. Then, competition perspective is considered. Finally the city brand postioning proposal for the eight cities combining customer perception, competion and also resource endowment is raised.The main contributions are as below:First of all, the paper conducted comprehensive literature review both at home and abroad regarding the fields of city brand and destination image measurement and summed up the most current study results on the bases of which the paper raises the brand new perspective of customer perception and competition to build brand positioning. These efforts provide future study with a good platform for information and reference.Second, the paper conducts estabilished qualitative and quantitative research methods .Using open questions in the qualitative study to gather the attibutes lists could avoid the subjectivity of raising the lists by the author from past literature and using multivariate statistical analysis on the quantitative data can help get more objective and effective research results.Third, the paper shows the complete process of practicing the city brand positioning from customer perception and competition through empirical case cities so that the other could have a reference for future practice. Last but not least, the academic result of this paper provides reference for the eight cities in their brand building practice.