The 'mental topography' of the Shanghai city brand: A netnographic approach to formulating city brand positioning strategies

Research has documented that social media facilitated word-of-mouth has become the most influential city brand communication channel. This online ethnography of the the Shanghai city brand experience applies a predetermined, 16-dimensional construct as the heuristic strategy for data gathering and analysis. It identifies the person-to-person encounters dimension as the most salient. Dimensions such as environmentalism, which in other studies has been identified as significant for the Shanghai city brand, appears to occupy a relatively low priority in the online discourse relating to Shanghai. These insights can be can be leveraged for the purpose of formulating a realistic brand positioning strategy for Shanghai, centered around the items constituting the encounters dimension. Further this study identifies that while the city branding associated with the World Expo in 2010 appears to be disconnected from the salience of the encounters dimensions, the Shanghai city branding campaign launched in 2015 is more congruent with the findings of this study as it draws on the historical uniqueness of Shanghai as being a space for inter-cultural encounters between East and West.