Redai dili (Jan 2022)
Perception of Brand Personality of Urban Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Qiming Li, Jiangmen, Guangdong
Abstract
Place branding is an important means of enhancing place value. It promotes the competitiveness of a place by delivering a unique image distinguished from other places to the audience, to stimulate the development of the local economy and enhance the value of the place. Place branding is not merely a simple top-down marketing process, but a process in which multiple stakeholders collectively assign value to a place. Consequently, more scholars have begun to consider how consumers perceive place brands from the bottom-up. Existing marketing research has focused on the implicit aspects of brand perception. The measurement of implicit perception helps to better predict consumer preferences and behavior. Therefore, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science methods are used for brand perception. However, place branding has insufficiently considered implicit attitudes. The complexity of place branding lies in the fact that it is affected by the interaction between humans and places, and the differences in the meanings of different groups in the construction of places lead to contradictions in the meaning of place brands. Non-representational theory can provide an epistemological explanation for solving implicit and unconscious spatial practices in human-place interactions. This study posits that the combination of non-representational theory and psychological methods will help provide a new research approach for the implicit perception of place brands. Therefore, this study adopted Qiming Li in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, as an example. Based on the priming paradigm, this study used brand personality questionnaire surveys and clue task experiments to analyze people's perceptions of place brand personality. By comparing the differences in implicit attitudes between residents and non-residents, and the differences between the explicit and implicit perceptions of local residents, we analyzed the impact of people's implicit perceptions on the construction of place branding. The results revealed that due to the difference in daily life experience between residents and non-residents, they have constructed different place meanings in Qiming Li. Non-residents regarded it as an urban renewal project, while local residents integrated daily life memories and experiences with it, leading to differences in implicit perception. The difference between the explicit and implicit attitudes of local residents indicated that the place brand of Qiming Li was only a consumption and self-expression tool, which had generated a functional level of place identity, but lacked recognition at the affective and value levels. People's perceptions of both explicit and implicit perceptions contributed to the construction of the meaning of place brands. Therefore, place branding needs to consider non-representational experiences and eliminate non-representation through bottom-up participation. Representational memories, emotions, and experiences were integrated into the brand narrative. This study helps compensate for the lack of focus on implicit cognition in past place brand research, and attempts to provide an explanation of the human-place interaction. The impact of people's daily life experience, embodied cognition, and place identity into the brand enables place branding to gain sustainable value proliferation.
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