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Which city theme has the strongest local brand equity for Hong Kong: green, creative or smart city?

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Abstract

Greenness, creativity and smartness are three common themes that cities often use to market or brand themselves as attractive and sustainable places. These themes have their own trajectories of theoretical development, but their ability to generate values to the people shows that a theme has the potential to be transformed into a promising brand. This suggests an approach of studying the brand equity of these themes based on a number of dimensions suggested in the literature: brand awareness, perceived brand quality, brand associations and brand loyalty. Since local residents play an indispensable role in place branding and sustainable urban development, this paper presents a study that aims to reveal the level of brand equity of the green, creative and smart city themes of Hong Kong as perceived by local residents (n = 263). The results suggest that a smart city theme carries more stable and higher brand equity when compared with green and creative themes. However, local people do have high aspirations of greenness and creativity for Hong Kong. Regression also builds up three models showing the locally perceived determinants of a successful green, creative and smart city for Hong Kong, respectively. The findings also highlight that city themes indeed overlap in nature, where the common attributes across themes may become the important clues to catch stakeholders’ attention.

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Acknowledgements

Part of the research idea presented in this paper was reported and connected to Chan, C. S., & Marafa, L. M. (2018). Knowledge-perception bridge of green-smart integration of cities: An empirical study of Hong Kong. Sustainability, 10(1), 107–126. The data and the results in this paper, however, are original and not overlapped with the above published article.

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  1. Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, NT, Hong Kong

    Chung-Shing Chan

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Appendix

Appendix

Models of brand equity for green, creative and smart city themes of Hong Kong.

figure a

Green city brand equity

figure b

Creative city brand equity

figure c

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Chan, CS. Which city theme has the strongest local brand equity for Hong Kong: green, creative or smart city?. Place Brand Public Dipl 15, 12–27 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-018-0106-x

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