Adam in ads: a thirty-year look at mediated masculinities in advertising in Finland and the US

siirretty Doriast

The Voice of Dwellers - Developin a place brand by listening to the residents

Purpose – Listening to the customers has long been a key phrase and success element in product branding.This paper aims to highlight the importance of listening to residents during the branding of a place. Thestudy explores ways of listening to residents to ensure they are heard and also discusses the challenges andbenefits related to place branding flowing from having residents participate in decision-making processes.Design/methodology/approach – Listening to residents and offering opportunities to participate requiresplace branders to fully attend to, comprehend and respond to residents’ comments, requests, ideas and feedback. This study reports on how two Nordic cities – Turku and Helsinki – listen to their residents. The data used comprise face-to-face interviews, telephone and e-mail conversations and documentary material.Findings – Residents should not be considered as one homogeneous target; participation options and channels should be adapted to the demographics and geographic issues of the different regions and resident groups.Research limitations/implications – The role of residents and the importance of listening are crucialfeatures in the emerging concept of inclusive place branding (Kavaratzis et al., 2017); its future conceptualdevelopment could benefit fromthe case examples at hand.Practical implications – City authorities should listen to residents and provide them with opportunitiesto actively contribute to decision-making. Other cities could learn from the examples introduced in the paper.Originality/value – This paper documents two Nordic examples of cities putting into practice a policy oflistening to the residents, a previously neglected research area.Keywords Stakeholders, Participation, Residents, Listening, City governance,Inclusive place brandingPaper type Research paper</p

Toponyms and place heritage as sources of place brand value

Commercial producers have long seen the advantage of branding their products, and the idea of branding also attracts place managers. In general, the core component of a brand is its name. In place branding, the name is even more crucial. It marks a geographical entity and creates the identity and image of the place. Having stayed unchanged, it represents longevity and stability and can be regarded as the place’s memory. In addition, place names carry of strong emotional attachment. The longer the history behind a name, the more meaningful it is as a word. A strong place brand is built upon a strong place heritage. Heritage is acknowledged as one of the future priorities in branding research. It is one of the intangible factors, in other words associations that differentiate brands from each other and are a source of tangible prosperity. Many of these associations are susceptible to competitor copying them – however, not the heritage or the name.This paper will introduce the conceptualisation of place heritage, with the place name being one of the focal components. For this, we will use data from our previous empirical survey carried out in 2013 on the 28 municipalities in Southwestern Finland. This survey investigated residents’ attitudes towards municipality names and name changes. Herein, we will focus on answers to two statements in the survey – The name of my place of domicile is important to me, and A name change will weaken the sense of community and solidarity in the municipality – and correlations between them and the place heritage value of each municipality. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a place name in reference to place heritage value and to show an example of utilising this value in place branding. </p

Kunnan nimellä on väliä

Kunnan nimellä on asukkaille suuri merkitys. Kotikunnan nimen muuttaminen voi herättää kiihkeitä tunteita, minkä vuoksi kuntaliitostilanteissa pitäisi käytännön asioiden lisäksi käsitellä perusteellisesti myös nimikysymystä. Tämä käy ilmi Turun yliopiston tutkijoiden tekemästä selvityksestä.</p

Kommunens namn i kommunsloganer : perspektiv från lingvistik och marknadsföring

Peer reviewe

Positive and negative emotional spirals in eWOM of new recreational sports: A case study on Nordic Walking

Practising physical activities in public spaces may evoke a variety of emotional expressions, particularly when an activity is considered novel and embarrassing. To date, there is limited knowledge on emotional sharing concerning novel recreational activities in online context via electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). We approach this knowledge gap by exploring online discussions on Nordic walking, the purpose being to investigate emotional sharing in online discussions concerning the activity. In our netnographic study, we analyse what kinds of discrete emotions related to Nordic walking are shared online in different countries, what the triggers of online emotional sharing are and what the outcomes expressed online by Nordicwalking practitioners are. We collected data from countries with various levels of Nordicwalking popularity and discovered four types of dynamics – negative spiral, positive spiral, positive change and negative change – that add to the research concerning emotional sharing.</p