Place branding performances in tourist local food shops

•Place branding and tourism are increasingly mutually enacted.•Place branding performed at local food & wine shops addresses tourists.•Material, discursive and bodily performances should both be taken into account.•A performative approach invites a move away from rigid positivist frameworks.•Less patronising enactments of branding are not necessarily less problematic.

This article adopts a performative approach to analysing encounters between tourists, retailers, objects, architectures, detailing the communication devices inherent in bringing “to life” a thematic selection of a place’s multiple identities to promote tourism. It draws on integrated interpretations of performative approaches, illustrating them relative to the place branding enacted at local food & wine shops to address tourists visiting Verucchio, Italy. The study contributes to the literature on tourism by proposing the concept of performative place branding, enabling a more creative, hybrid, and open-ended consideration of the relationship between tourist places and place branding. This contrasts with the “top-down” logic employed in previous studies and policies for promoting tourist destinations.