City Branding and Participatory Ethnography in the Global South: Evidence From the Case of Trinidad (Cuba)

Although city branding has been consolidated as a strategic resource for projecting cities internationally, in practice it often reproduces top-down approaches dominated by specialised consultants and urban elites, with only limited citizen participation. This limitation is particularly evident in the Global South, where participation is frequently reduced to symbolic and dismissive consultations during the final stages of projects, and where documented methodological experiences remain scarce. Within this context, the city of Trinidad (Cuba), a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognised for its cultural, natural, and patrimonial richness, launched the construction of its city brand. This paper aims to present the participatory construction of that brand, whose novelty lies in the use of participatory ethnography. For this purpose, a methodological protocol was designed, validated through expert judgment, and implemented by combining cycles of participatory ethnographic work with critical reflection by the creative professional team. Across three ethnographic cycles, more than 1,200 contributions were gathered from citizens, entrepreneurs, cultural stakeholders, and government representatives, applying the criterion of theoretical saturation by cohorts. The final brand proposal was evaluated by an interdisciplinary expert panel of 20 international specialists, who confirmed both its validity and the robustness of the methodological procedure. In addition to achieving a brand with a high level of social appropriation, the findings highlight active participation and critical reflexivity as means to make visible and address tensions between hybrid identities, community conflicts, the technical criteria of creative professionals, and local aspirations. The validated methodological protocol represents a novel contribution, offering a reference applicable to city branding projects developed in socialist and centralised contexts of the Global South. Furthermore, this study contributes to theoretical debate by proposing practical guidelines for implementing participatory city branding.