Place Branding for Smart Cities and Smart Tourism Destinations: Do They Communicate Their Smartness?

Smart cities and smart tourism destinations integrate technological infrastructures and end-user devices with the aim of providing more satisfying experiences. They generate expectations of superior innovation, greater interactivity, participation and a better image. Therefore, they need to communicate their smartness and include it in their branding. The study analyses the smart content present in the tourist and non-tourist official Twitter accounts of a selection of smart cities and smart destinations, through semantic analysis, in order to find out which smart concepts are strategically branded to create a smart tourism destination image. The results show that the best cities in the ranking for each smart topic are not the ones with highest percentages of tweets on that topic. The study also shows that the number and percentage of tweets that communicate smart aspects on the platforms analyzed are low, showing the smartness is not included in their branding. It has also been observed that, almost all cities communicate or do not communicate the same concepts, evincing an undifferentiated branding strategy. The results of this study are interesting for urban policy-makers and tourism destination marketers to improve their branding.

Automated summary

The study found that the cities with the highest percentage of tweets on each smart topic were not necessarily the best cities in the ranking. Additionally, the analysis showed that the number and percentage of tweets communicating smart aspects on the platforms were low, indicating that smartness is not included in their branding. Almost all cities communicated or did not communicate the same concepts, revealing a lack of differentiation in their branding strategies.