City Branding In The New Media Era:A Case Study Of Changsha

With the globalisation of the economy,city branding has become a powerful tool to attract investment,develop tourism and retain people when it comes to enhancing the competitiveness of cities.Cities at home and abroad,such as New York,Paris,London,Tokyo,Shanghai and Beijing,which have been successfully branded,continue to polish and update their own brands and put new connotations into their cities,in line with the development of the times.In China,first-,second-and third-tier cities are also competing to develop city brands,with cities such as Xi'an,Wuhan,Chongqing,Chengdu and Xiamen standing out as popular tourist destinations,where successful city brands can make a city perform better in the market.In her book City Branding and New Media,Paganoni suggests that new media communication strategies have an important and invaluable role to play in city branding in the current digital age.In 2016,Changshawanbao,one of the largest local medias in Changsha,reported the city as a "net-celebrity city" for the first time,and Changsha became a new online-celebrated city as if overnight.It has also been featured on Sina Weibo,TikTok,Kwai,Bilibili,Xiaohongshu and other social media platforms,with a huge number of Changsha-related topics,views and clicks.Its local beverage SexyTea and canteen Wenheyou have become its new name cards,and have been widely discussed on all mainstream social media platforms.What role does city branding play in making Changsha one of the new net-celebrated cities?It is worth exploringThis essay takes the communication of Changsha's city brand as the object of research,based on the City Identity Communication model proposed by Kavaratzis,combined with the theories related to city brand communication proposed by Kavaratzis,Anholt,Moilanen and other scholars;the information on Changsha's city brand construction was collected from the People's Municipal Government of Changsha City and its portal,etc.,and the connotation of Changsha's city brand,the city brand communication stakeholders and brand communication strategies were analysed and studied.The study focuses on specific cases such as the Hunan Provincial Museum,the Changsha Wall and "Guarding the Jiefang West Road",with a view to exploring the communication of Changsha's city brand in the new media environment,especially the practice of social media platforms used by various brand communication parties to communicate Changsha's city brand,so as to understand the role of new media in the communication of city brand in the present era.The study found that "entertainment culture","smart manufacturing" and"red/revolutionary" constitute Changsha's major city identities,and "entertainment"can be further divided into food,history,dialect,shopping,music,audio-visual and other sub-classes.The main stakeholder of Changsha's city communication is the Government and its authorities,which play the role of policy guidance and support,initially defining the general connotation and direction of city branding,supplemented by local enterprises and other social organisations,such as well-known restaurant brands including SexyTea,and Wenheyou,and cultural institutions including the Hunan Provincial Museum,while citizens and KOLs are also the stakeholders of its city brand communication.Different city communication stakeholders adopt or participate in different city brand communication strategies,including advertising communication,public relations communication,sales communication,word-of-mouth communication,audio-visual works communication and social media communication,with new media platforms such as TikTok,Kwai,Sina Weibo,WeChat subscriptions,portals and mobile terminals as communication channelsIn the whole brand communication process,the "entertainment" identity was the-most effective,basically forming the corresponding city image,while the identities of"smart manufacturing" and "red" did not achieve the desired effect as the audience perceived Changsha's characteristics as a net-celebrated city for "fun" or"entertainment." After analysis,the "smart manufacturing" identity is not effective mainly because of the following reasons:firstly,the concept of smart manufacturing is relatively complex and specific,which is not easy to popularise;secondly,many people focus on the final presentation of communication,and are less interested in the technological tools applied to it;thirdly,Changsha's own decision-making is unbalanced,mainly investing in the promotion of smart manufacturing enterprises,rather than,via infrastructure,integrating "smart manufacturing" with Changsha's urban life.The Red City,on the other hand,is not well communicated,firstly because the themed is serious and its message cannot be disseminated as quickly as the relaxing entertainment theme.Secondly,because the theme relies mainly on traditional media,whose audience volume is constantly compressed in the new media era,and it has not found the right combination with new media platforms or technologies.Thus,its communication is limited in the new media era,which pursues short and quick results.