City branding and its economic impacts on tourism

Abstract

Economic competition of cities from the point of view of tourism, trade and investments is becoming very intensive as the world economy goes global. Certain cities are attracting all of the assets and the attention, while others are becoming more or less invisible. One of the key prerequisities for the success of cities is their overall image, or so-called „city branding“. Th e perception of the city aff ects its attractiveness to tourists, foreign investors or potential students. Marketing experts are trying to brand or re-brand cities in order to create a community where people will want to live and that will be attractive for the visitors. Our paper analyzes diff erent approaches to city branding based on empirical statistical data analysis for assessing the relationship between quality of the city brand and average price of hotels in the city. Our results yielded a positive relationship between the value of the cities’ brands and the hotel prices in the cities, although the scope is not as big as in the case of the Saff ron barometer. Our findings can be explained by the diff ering concepts of the used indexes: while CBI is more general and includes economic, education and infrastructure aspects, the Saff ron barometer is much more tourism-related.