Authenticity in tension with homogeneity in grassroots place branding
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Authenticity in tension with homogeneity in grassroots place branding Paige Ambord1 Revised: 24 April 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This article considers a group of residents from South Bend, Indiana who sought to visually rebrand their city using Instagram. It asks how a group that sees itself as prizing authenticity, ultimately settled on a single, coherent style. The resident artists as a group of primarily young, white professionals in creative fields, sought to capture the authentic South Bend; that is, the city as they experience it as residents. By tracing the development of this community of resident artists and the strategies they pursued to shift perceptions of the city for the better, this study argues that the dynamics of grassroots, residentinitiated branding lead to homogeneity, even among those attentive to the representation of diverse perspectives in their content. To advance their own account of the city, these resident artists cultivated a community of like-minded individuals through recruitment and a process of socialization into their approach to civic boosterism using photography meetups and collaborative content creation. Their meetups and their attention to the photos’ reception by those on the platform for their efforts—Instagram—ultimately facilitated the group’s convergence on a single style. Keywords Authenticity · Homogeneity · Grassroots branding · Culture · Instagram
Introduction Within the practice of place branding lies an inherent contradiction. Though the theoretical goal of place branding is to draw out the distinct character of different cities—what Paulsen (2004) calls place character—in practice, branding campaigns often do the opposite (Fretter 1993; Holcomb 1993; Julier 2005; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007). For example, Guy Julier (2005) finds that a diverse array of cities describe themselves in many of the same terms; Singapore, Brisbane and Birmingham are “dynamic,” “cosmopolitan,” and “diverse,” while Johannesburg and Manchester are “vibrant,” and Birmingham, Glasgow, and Johannesburg are “cultural” (p. 872). Though these descriptors may be accurate, their generality likely does little to shift perceptions of place. Most accounts for this dynamic argue it results from the strategic aims of branding campaigns. For example, branding campaigns may attempt to appeal widely in order to * Paige Ambord [email protected] 1
University of Notre Dame, 4060 Jenkins Nanovic Halls, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
attract investment. That is, branding campaigns sometimes “conform to the common denominator of tastes” (Gottdiener 1997, p. 152). As a result, then, branding campaigns become so broad as to be indistinguishable. A similar argument contends that the demands of stakeholders can lead to an overly general brand. Using the example of nation branding, Fan (2006) cautions that, “trying to be one thing to all audiences or all things to all audiences renders the message meaningless” (p. 10). In short, for a brand to be generally accepted by a variety
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