A Research On Building An Evaluation Index System For Place Brand In The City

From the 90s in 20th century, the theoretical research on place branding started to show the trend in expanding into several subfields such as country branding, city branding and destination branding. As one important subfield, place branding in the city is getting more and more attention from academic, industry and government. However, the research on the building of the system for place branding in the city is very rare, especially, there is very little research focusing on the evaluation index system.With the continuous progress of the urbanization in China, we start to see more and more place brand in a few cities in China. The purpose of this research is to build an evaluation index system that reflects the relationship between place brand in the city and government, industry and customers.First, based on a comprehensive literature review of related research, the dissertation first summarized the formation mechanism and developing path of the place brand in the city, the relationship between the place brand in the city and the government, industry and customer. And the first and second level indicators were decided for the evaluation index system.Second, the author had in-depth interview with officers from related department in the Shanghai government and the experts and managers from selected companies that represent the industry, and finally defined the 32 third level indicators of the evaluation index system. And the weights of all the indicators were calculated based on the rating by the experts and analytic hierarchy process.Third, a questionnaire was developed and samples were selected for a survey did for Tian Zi Fang and Zhang Jiang High Tech Park. The final results combined with observation and judgment of both locations proves the evaluation index system is valid and could be implemented.The key outputs of this research are: created an evaluation index system; defined the relationship between the place brand in the city and government, industry and customers; validate the index system by applying the index system to two place brands in Shanghai.