Problematising place branding research: A meta-theoretical analysis of the literature

Place branding is commonly understood as the general phenomenon of marketing, branding, promoting and regeneration of a particular city, region and/or location. Place branding has attracted an increasing number of researchers belonging to different disciplines producing a highly interdisciplinary literature. However, the complexity and problems connected with it has not been coped with sufficiently in previous studies. Therefore the aim of the present paper is to problematise place branding research by performing a meta-theoretical analysis of the literature. The authors do this by adopting the mod el developed by Burrell and Morgan (1979) that helps to highlight different ontological and epistemological foundations. The analysis is based on a corpus of 292 articles retrieved from different databases. From the analysis the authors propose a framework based on six different perspectives of place branding. The paper concludes by suggesting areas that future studies should address.