Tales of Cities: City Branding Through Storytelling

As an intriguing concept, storytelling has attracted many researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, a specific context of storytelling approach, city branding through storytelling has rarely been reported in the literature. In this study, we show how cities can regard storytelling as a strategic branding tool and investigate how authorities and marketers can create the core story of a city's brand. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, the theoretical framework proposed highlights the role of storytelling both as a strategic branding concept, and as an operational communication tool in the city brand building process. Second, based on the Laboratory model of Third, this research integrates storytelling literature to the city marketing literature through offering a basis framework where the process of generating the city's core story consists of four elements (message, conflict, cognitive and affective components and plot) leaning on the critical principles of storytelling.