Building city brands through sport events: Theoretical and empirical perspectives

This paper reflects theoretically and empirically on destination marketing and destination branding, with a specific focus on creating strong city brands. It will be argued why a strong destination brand makes it easier for marketers to attract visitors, new residents and investors to the destination. Focus is on how city brands are connected to major sporting events in order to achieve a number of branding objectives. Using an established city brand evaluation instrument, preliminary data from a four-country general population sample are presented, foreshadowing that some approaches may work better than others when choosing to use sport events to build strong city brands. In particular, it was found that building a strong event portfolio seems important in building long-lasting positive impressions about a city and its image.