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This study aims to contribute to an increased understanding of intra-organizational city brand resistance by identifying and discussing different types of counter-narratives emerging from the political and administrative arenas.

The empirical material consists of secondary data as well as six in-depth semi-structured interviews with Danish mayors and city managers in three different municipalities in Denmark.

Intra-organizational counter-narratives differ from inter-organizational counter-narratives but resemble a number of issues known from extra-organizational resistance. Still, significant differences are found within the political arena: lack of ownership, competition for resources and political conflicts. Lack of ownership, internal competition for resources and distrust of motives play an important role within the administrative arena. Mayors are aware of the needs for continued political support for branding projects but projects are nonetheless realized despite resistance if there is a political majority for it.

This study points to the implications of city brand resistance and counter-narratives emerging from the “inside” of the political and administrative arenas in the city, here defined as “intra-organizational counter-narratives”.

It is suggested that politicians and municipality staff should be systematically addressed as individual and unique audiences and considered as important as citizens in the brand process.

So far little attention has been paid to internal stakeholders within the municipal organization and their impact on the city branding process approached from a narrative perspective.

Purpose – Stemming from extant literature on consumer brand narratives and the rising quest for consumption authenticity, the chapter aims at merging these two streams of knowledge. How can brand authenticity be defined and narrated? To what extent do companies and consumers interact? What are the consequences for branding?

Methodology – The chapter is case-based, and illustrates the branding strategy of l’Occitane en Provence, a company producing toiletries with a strong Mediterranean rooting. Data were collected through multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Paris and Manosque, Haute Provence. Depth and short interviews with customers and managers of l’Occitane were complemented by extensive observation and secondary data. The comprehensive dataset was analyzed consistently with interpretive research tenets.

Findings – Data document (i) five dimensions of brand authenticity contextualized to l’Occitane Mediterranean brand; (ii) the different branding strategies made possible to companies by the varied combination of these five dimensions; and (iii) the distinct profiles of brand consumers according to the specific authentic narrative each of them is more receptive to.

Practical implications – Implications for authentic brand narratives are drawn. I argue that when companies adopt a narrative approach to branding they can establish a stronger dialogue with customers and defend their competitive advantage more effectively. Actually, each brand narrative cannot be easily imitated by competitors since its imitation would turn out as a fake, unauthentic tale for the market.

Originality of the chapter – The chapter contributes to the fields of branding and authenticity, by extending the notion and understanding of consumption authenticity to brands.

With the rise of digital media and content marketing, business-to-business (B2B) technology firms increasingly use narratives in their marketing strategy. If research has studied the impact of narrative on audiences, the structuration of the narrative strategies is still an overlooked area. The purpose of this paper is to understand the structuration of narrative strategies.

Authors studied the cases of narratives on the Internet of Things produced by two leading technology firms, IBM and Cisco, between 2012 and 2016. Material includes advertising campaigns, blogs, written customer cases, white papers, public speeches and selling discourses.

The research highlights the importance of metanarratives as the core of the structuration of seemingly different contents. It also shows how firms tap into fundamental mythic archetypes and broader sociocultural narratives to try and legitimate the emerging technology. Finally, research also introduces the concept of transmedia strategy and illustrates its use by the two firms studied.

The results are based on only two cases of multinational firms, limiting the generalization of the findings.

The results of the research may encourage firms to use more narrative branding strategies. They also offer directions for the key elements to manage when elaborating a narrative strategy (defining key metanarratives, identifying and using broader sociocultural narratives, designing a transmedia strategy).

The paper is among the first to try to understand the structuration of narrative branding strategies. While exploratory, it contributes to research on B2B branding and digital branding by bringing the narrative into B2B branding research.

To date, the importance of smaller, local community events in the place branding process has been overlooked in the place branding and event studies literature – yet they are recognised as a means of increasing the attractiveness of a place for residents, through building a sense of community and contributing to quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to make clear the contribution of community event narratives to place branding.

A qualitative approach was adopted. The public narratives of a portfolio of 14 community events (from event websites, press releases and media discourse, local government strategic policy documents) were examined. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted, and a visual framework for analysing and discussing the findings was created.

Community event narratives provide a useful resource that could be drawn upon by place branding practitioners to reach potential new residents who share similar ideals as local residents. The findings from this study demonstrate that local community event narratives do indeed tell “stories about who we are”.

This paper has implications for place branding initiatives seeking to attract new residents, particularly where there is a sense of fear and resistance from residents about “outsiders” moving in.

This paper presents an alternative model to the traditional city branding campaigns that seek to attract new residents, in the form of a values-based event-led branding strategy that may be more appropriate and compatible with local stakeholder goals.

This study aims to explore whether adopting a sustainability narrative in city branding and urban development strategies results in more inclusive governance arrangements (process) and a more pluralistic approach to generating sustainability value (outcome), in line with the triple bottom line approach advocated by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors argue that a necessary step to enable meaningful sustainable urban development is to rethink the way in which “value” and “value creation” are being interpreted in urban development policies and city branding narratives.

Mixed-methods case study of New York City’s (NYC) urban development and city branding strategies (2007–2019) combining analysis of academic and grey literature on NYC’s urban development and city branding, value hierarchies in NYC urban development strategic plans and local media reports covering NYC’s development and branding processes.

Despite claiming commitment to urban sustainability, NYC’s urban development and branding narratives reveal a clear dominance of interpreting “value” primarily as “exchange value”, thus prioritising economic growth.

In the authors’ view, a systemic, systematic and structured approach to generating “sustainability value” is necessary if city branding is to become a governance tool to support sustainable urban development. A “tetravaluation” approach is recommended as a practical, structured framework that can bridge across the ideas of “sustainability value” and “pluralistic governance”, ensuring effective implementation. Further investigation in additional urban contexts is required.

The research contributes to current scholarly debates towards more balanced and pluralistic conceptions of “value” and place branding as a more holistic, participatory and democratic governance model for sustainable urban development.

This article tackles Croatian public diplomacy, destination and nation branding vis-à-vis an emerging Instagram trend to publish dark tourism related pictures sometimes using the official hashtag CroatiaFullOfLife; hence, poking Croatia tourism development accounts, which promote the country as merely a Riviera destination, and deletes the memories of Yugoslavian and Second Independence wars. Such a monolithic, shortsighted and amnesic destination branding strategy neglects alternative public tourism and public diplomacy opportunities.

The article may improve the understanding of the links between the concepts of Public Diplomacy, nation and destination branding through an exploratory study of dark tourism amateurs experiences in Croatia, documented by pictures published on Instagram, the key digital social media for destination branding. It also outlines the history of Croatian tourism and government's efforts in promoting the overwhelming image of a sunny sea destination since the launching of the “Croatia Full Of Life” destination branding campaign in 2015. The study compares what and how dark tourism amateurs and Croatian main social media influencers publish contents destined to foreign publics.

Croatia's official PR strategies and Instagram accounts ignore the increasing interest of foreign tourists, local younger generations and artists in abandoned places and Yugoslavian and Homeland War heritage monuments. These “light dark chiaroscuro” places are nowhere to be seen on Croatia's official Instagram account. Croatian government fails to embrace some aspects of the nation identity and to take advantage of Instagram trends and niche dark tourism influencers to boost and enrich its public diplomacy and the memorialization process of the darkest aspects of its past.

This research suggests that international Instagram influencers as well as local photographers, artists and history amateurs promote many shades of light–dark chiaroscuro tourism approaches. Their posts tell new narratives about the past and its memorialization, far from the silence and denial promoted by Croatian official Instagram accounts. Mainstream IG Croatian lifestyle marketing influencers and institutional accounts consistently shows beaches, blue waters and bikinis strictly respecting a monolithic, shortsighted and amnesic destination branding strategy. This study shows that some destination and nation-branding strategies could hinder rather than enhance public diplomacy.

Narratives are central to consumers’ understanding of brands especially during change. The financial crisis that began in 2008 offered a changing marketplace from which to develop two managerially useful frameworks of consumer narratives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Consumer focus groups, interviews with bankers and qualitative consumer surveys were used to gather consumers’ narratives about retail banking. The narratives were examined through frameworks from both the humanities and psychology (narrative identity).

The individual consumer narratives were used to create first a possible cultural narrative or bird’s eye view and later archetypal narratives of groups of consumers for a ground-level view of the changing marketplace.

Like all early research, the findings must be examined in other contexts to improve generalizability.

The narrative results revealed the impact of change on consumers’ identities, views of other entities and retail banking activity to yield managerially actionable information for segmentation, target marketing, branding and communication.

Frameworks are developed for consumer narratives which are shown to be useful tools in examining consumers’ reactions to changing markets and in formulating marketing responses.

The past is important for various known and unknown reasons. This paper aims to reveal and justify unacknowledged reasons why, when and how managers should consider leveraging the pasts of previously successful but currently declining brands to restore their more desirable historical market positions.

This conceptual paper combines marketing and branding theory with historical branding examples, anecdotes and inductive inferences to develop and justify brand-pastness as a theoretically-grounded and managerially-actionable repositioning concept that could be applied to resurrect declining brands.

The emergent historically-grounded brand-pastness framework generates innovative insights that could be applied in the future. These insights explain when, why and how brand managers could apply brand-pastness to resurrect declining brands. The framework also facilitates the development of a brand-pastness-based research agenda. The agenda is driven by questions structured to address the nature, scope and potential applications of brand-pastness as a new concept and useful repositioning tool.

This paper’s recommendations are limited by their conceptual and inductive origins. However, a research agenda is developed to guide and structure future empirical investigations of the branding antecedents to and consequences of a prospective brand-pastness construct.

This paper introduces, conceptualizes and justifies the potential value of a historically-grounded concept called brand-pastness. The concept may prove beneficial when marketing managers use brand-pastness to reposition and resurrect declining brands by re-instilling targeted consumers’ historical perceptions of brands’ past superiority.

Employing the Star Wars brand as a case study, this paper seeks to critically discuss the importance of comparative mythology for inter-generational branding and consumption practices within arts related markets.

Secondary data have been gathered focusing on the analysis of material in the form of books, academic journals, films, videos, television programs, websites and media reports related to the interface between comparative mythology, the Star Wars brand.

First, this paper indicates how the long-standing success of the Star Wars brand mirrors and reflects the power of monomythic storytelling in creating a platform for arts and place building branding associations and extensions for numerous products and services. Second, this study shows and highlights the potential of monomythic structures/storytelling and comparative mythology in acting an underlying cultural platform whereupon several arts brand associations, narratives, extensions and overall strategies can emerge. Finally, this project suggests how arts marketing scholars could further explore the infusion of mythological narratives within branding practices in the areas of performing/visual arts, museums, entertainment and arts related tourism campaigns.

Focusing on the most successful film franchise of all times, this study argues that comparative mythology constitutes an endless source for common templates of artistic, cross-cultural and inter-generational marketing practices focusing on universal moral codes and archetypes.

Creative entrepreneurship has contributed to economic development of regions and countries and have become models for the countries in the Western world. Jewelry designer entrepreneurs are one of the contributors toward creative economy for their role in economic prosperity. This article aims to investigate brand-building efforts of jewelry designer entrepreneurs. This study also aims to explore how jewelry designer entrepreneurs develop and communicate brand narrative, and how brand backstories confer value to jewelry.

This study used a qualitative approach. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with seven Portuguese designer jewelry.

The study identified seven themes to reflect the brand narratives of the Portuguese jewelry designer entrepreneurs: designer artists considered the importance of international recognition; designer jewelry uses the ontological metaphor to connect emotionally; designer jewelry making a jewelry piece that is fluid and organic; limited association with fashion; distinctive brand communication; fair pricing strategy; and identifying self as artistic worker. The study also shows that jewelry designer entrepreneurs adopt a distinctive brand communication tactics to connect emotionally with imagine customers.

This study proposes a general and managerial guide to boost personal brand jewelry designer entrepreneurs through brand narratives.

This study bridges an academia gap on personal branding, exploring how jewelry designer entrepreneurs develop and communicate brand narrative and brand backstories adding value to the jewelry industry.