This paper aims to analyze the case of Cartagena, Colombia, as a case of a failed destination branding. It also broadens the findings by connecting them to the extant literature about place branding, thus making this paper more explanatory. It tries to fit the fieldwork’s findings into the two main streams of branding research (bottom-up vs top-down). This paper also gives practical insights into the destination’s network of stakeholders and discusses ways to improve the destination’s management and branding.,This paper uses a mixed methodology approach. Field work consisted of online questionnaire to hospitality employees in the city plus semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 “expert” stakeholders in the destination. This paper is of empirical nature.,The main cause of the destination’s brand failure is found to be the top-down approach to the place brand strategy. The literature shows that cases such as this one are more common than assumed, and a possible way out of the problem is the application of bottom-up or “mixed” approaches, as these may circumvent the problems found.,Cases like this one illustrate very well a local context but might be difficult to transfer to other contexts, so the generalization power of this paper is limited to similar places in the sociopolitical sense of the term.,For place branding practitioners and destination management organizations , this paper is a call for participative approaches which include all of the stakeholders of a place.,This paper offers an in-depth study of a branding case in Latin America, a part of the world relatively unexplored in the branding literature. On the basis of the presented case, this paper pitches top-down versus bottom-up approaches. Finally, it explains the findings by connecting the place to its broad geographical context.

中文翻译：

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在自上而下的政策环境中探索目标品牌的脱离度

本文旨在分析哥伦比亚卡塔赫纳的案例，作为目的地品牌失败的案例。通过将其与现有的有关地方品牌的文献联系起来，也扩大了研究结果，从而使本文更具解释性。它试图将实地调查的结果纳入品牌研究的两个主要方面（自下而上与自上而下）。本文还提供了对目的地的利益相关者网络的实际见解，并讨论了改善目的地的管理和品牌的方法。，本文使用混合方法论方法。现场工作包括向城市中的酒店员工进行在线问卷调查，以及与目的地的18个“专家”利益相关者进行的半结构化访谈。本文具有经验性质。发现目的地品牌失败的主要原因是自上而下的地方品牌策略。文献表明，这种情况比假设的情况更为普遍，解决此问题的一种可能方法是采用自下而上或“混合”方法，因为这些方法可能会规避所发现的问题。非常适合本地环境，但可能难以转移到其他环境，因此，从社会政治意义上讲，本文的概括能力仅限于相似的地方。对于场所品牌从业者和目的地管理组织，本文称呼包括一个地方的所有利益相关者在内的参与性方法。，本文对拉丁美洲的品牌案例进行了深入研究，品牌文献中相对未曾探索过的世界的一部分。在提出的案例的基础上，本文介绍了自上而下与自下而上的方法。最后，它通过将地点与广泛的地理环境联系起来来解释调查结果。