Veronika Koller | Department of Linguistics and English LanguageLancaster University
This paper compares the vision documents for a British borough and a German city to see how the city-as-brand is encoded in different semiotic modes, to draw inferences about the cognitive structure of the brand, to ascertain in how far any global brand values are adapted to local contexts, and discuss what this tells us about the relationship between councils and citizens. As such, the study represents a cognitive critical approach to discourse in which texts are seen as vehicles for their producers’ mental representations, disseminated to align recipients’ representations with those of producers. This approach leads to the investigation of linguistic and visual parameters such as attribution, actors and processes, modality and tense, and layout and logo elements. Despite local adaptations, both municipal entities are conceptualized as brands with largely generic and interchangeable attributes. Global competition among cities leads to the appropriation of corporate discourses, such as branding, which redefine and ultimately depoliticize the relationships between council and citizens.
1999“Social identity, social cognition, and the self: the flexibility and stability of self-categorization.” In Social Identity and Social Cognition, Dominic Abrams and Michael A. Hogg (Eds), 197—229.Oxford: Blackwell.
Augoustinos, Martha and Walker, Iain
1995Social Cognition: an Integrated Introduction. London: Sage.
Augoustinos, Martha, Walker, Iain and Donaghue Ngaire
2006Social Cognition: an Integrated Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
Baruch, Yehuda
2006“On logos, business cards: the case of UK universities.” In Artifacts and Organizations: Beyond Mere Symbolism. Anat Rafaeli and Michael G. Pratt (Eds), 181—198.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bhatia, Vijay K
2004Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1994“Rethinking the state: Genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field.”Sociological Theory 12(1): 1—18.
Christensen, Lars Thoger and Askegaard, Søren
2001“Corporate identity and corporate image revisited: a semiotic perspective.”European Journal of Marketing 35(3—4): 292—315.
De Michelis, Lidia
2008“Britain� and ‘corporate’ national identity.” In Communication in the Public Sphere. [Handbook of Applied Lniguistics vol. 4], Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller (Eds), 203—222.Berlin: de Gruyter.
Fairclough, Norman
2003Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman, Pardoe, Simon and Szerszynski, Bronislaw
2004“The discursive construction of a world-class city.”Discourse & Society 15(5): 579—605.
Grauel, Ralf
2000Die Macht der Marke. Brand eins March, 16—24.
Halliday, Michael A.K. and Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M
2004An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. London: Arnold.
Holland, Bob, Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen, Owen, Charles, Toolan, Michael
2007“Analysing business-speak in a university environment.” Paper presented at the CDA Symposium at Aston University/University of Birmingham (UK), 8 July.
Jones, Paul and Wilks-Heeg, Stuart
2004“Capitalising culture: Liverpool 2008.”Local Economy 19(4): 341—360.
Kapferer, Jean-Noël
2002“Corporate brand and organizational identity.” In Corporate and Organizational Identities: Integrating Strategy, Marketing, Communication and Organisational Perspectives, Bertrand Moingeon and Guillaume Soenen (Eds), 175—193.London: Routledge.
Koller, Veronika
2007“‘The world’s local bank’: Glocalisation as a strategy in corporate branding discourse.”Social Semiotics 17(1): 111—130.
Koller, Veronika
forthcoming. “Corporate self-presentation and self-centredness: a case for cognitive critical discourse analysis.” In Language and Social Cognition, Hanna Pishwa Ed Berlin de Gruyter
Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo
2006Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Machin, David
2004“Building the world’s visual language: the increasing global importance of image banks in corporate media.”Visual Communication 3(3): 316—336.
Machin, David and Mayr, Andrea
2007“Antiracism in the British government’s model regional newspaper: the ‘talking cure’”Discourse & Society 18(4): 453—478.
forthcoming. “The spread of corporate discourse to other social domains.” In Language and the Market, Helen Kelly-Homes and Gerlinde Mautner Eds Basingstoke Palgrave
Mommaas, Hans
2002“City branding: the necessity of socio-cultural goals.” In City Branding: Image Building and Building Images, Urban Affairs and Véronique Patteeuw (Eds), 34—47. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers.
Moscovici, Serge
2000Social Representations: Explorations in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Muniz, Albert M. and O’Guinn, Thomas C
2000“Brand community.”Journal of Consumer Research 271: 412—432.
Pagani, Giulio
2007“Expressions/representations of citizenship between the ‘state’ and the ‘citizen’: Register analysis of local government discourse.”Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 1(1): 1—18.http://www.cadaad.org/files/CADAAD1—1-Pagani-2007-Expressions_And_Representations_Of_State_And_Citizen.pdf
Parkerson, Belinda and Saunders, John
2005“City branding: Can goods and services branding models be used to brand cities?”Place Branding 1(3): 242—264.
Pimentel, Ronald W. and Heckler, Susan E
2003“Changes in logo design: Chasing the elusive butterfly curve.” In Persuasive Imagery: a Consumer Response Perspective. Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra (Eds), 105—127.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rayson, Paul
2008“Wmatrix: a web-based corpus processing environment”. Computing Department, Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/
Speaks, Michael
2002“Individualization without identity.” In City Branding: Image Building and Building Images, Urban Affairs and Véronique Patteeuw (Eds), 50—65. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers.
Stadtmarketing Lübeck
n.d. Available at http://stadtmarketing-luebeck.pfitzner.it/seiten/index.html. Accessed 4 June 2007.
Trueman, Myfanwy, Klemm, Mary and Giroud, Axele
2004“Can a city communicate? Bradford as a corporate brand.”Corporate Communications 9(4): 317—330.
van Dijk, Teun A
2003“The discourse-knowledge interface.” In Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak (Eds), 85—109.Basingstoke: Palgrave.
van Leeuwen, Theo
1996“The representation of social actors.” In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and R. Malcolm Coulthard (Eds), 32—71.London: Routledge.
Cited by
Cited by 13 other publications
Bolognesi, Marianna, Romy van den Heerik & Esther van den Berg
2013. Branding Istanbul: Representations of religion in promoting tourism. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 9:4 ► pp. 223 ff.
Giovanardi, Massimo, Andrea Lucarelli & Cecilia Pasquinelli
2013. Towards brand ecology. Marketing Theory 13:3 ► pp. 365 ff.
Hassen, Inès & Massimo Giovanardi
2018. The difference of ‘being diverse’: City branding and multiculturalism in the ‘Leicester Model’. Cities 80 ► pp. 45 ff.
Hayden, Craig & Efe Sevin
2012. The politics of meaning and the city brand: The controversy over the branding of Ankara. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 8:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Lam, Phoenix W. Y.
2018. The discursive construction and realization of the Hong Kong brand: a corpus-informed study. Text & Talk 38:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Lucarelli, Andrea & Massimo Giovanardi
2016. The political nature of brand governance: a discourse analysis approach to a regional brand building process. Journal of Public Affairs 16:1 ► pp. 16 ff.
Short, John Rennie
2015. City Marketing. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ► pp. 662 ff.
Tillotson, Jack S., Vito Tassiello, Alexandra S. Rome & Katariina Helaniemi
2021. The spirit of sauna: legitimating the Finnish place brand. Journal of Place Management and Development 14:3 ► pp. 262 ff.
Torkington, Kate
2012. Place and Lifestyle Migration: The Discursive Construction of ‘Glocal’ Place-Identity. Mobilities 7:1 ► pp. 71 ff.
2018. Official websites as a tourism marketing medium: A contrastive analysis from the perspective of appraisal theory. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management 10 ► pp. 164 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.