Smart city branding vision: multiple stakeholder perspectives

Abstract

City governments around the world are becoming smarter to enhance the quality of life of residents and the sustainability of the city. Becoming smart provides an opportunity to gain competitive advantages for cities by developing their identity as a smart city brand. To successfully brand a smart city, a smart city vision that incorporates the perspectives of different stakeholders can provide a useful basis for developing brand positioning strategies. This study aims to explore a smart city branding vision from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. The study constructs and analyzes the vision maps of a smart city brand for user innovators (n = 224) and end users (n = 716) in Taiwan through surveys and network analysis. The results reveal a vision map with thirty-one elements for the two groups, consisting of seven core elements and twenty-four peripheral elements. Compared to end users, user innovators have more vision associations with a smart city brand. Additionally, the two groups share four core vision elements: smart pay, smart traffic, sound information infrastructure, and smart education. This study provides researchers with different approaches to understanding city branding vision and provides city managers with a valuable reference while designing city services and devising branding strategies for smart cities.