Place brands across U.S. cities and growth in local high-technology sectors
Introduction
In September 2017, Amazon announced that it would establish a second headquarters (HQ2) in North America, inviting cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to bid. Amazon stated in its request for proposals that HQ2 “requires a compatible cultural and community environment for its long-term success.” Over 200 leaders representing cities across North America submitted proposals for HQ2, many of which included substantial tax incentives, promises to expand infrastructure (e.g. parks and transportation), and the promotion of local qualities such as livability and entertainment.1 Amazon weighed the financial benefits derived from tax incentives and access to transportation, but the selection criteria related to cultural fit attracted the most attention. In attempts to appeal to this criteria, leaders in cities like Nashville advertised their reputation as a “Music City,” those in Denver highlighted its livability, and city officials in Miami emphasized local diversity. Municipal leaders across North America vying for HQ2 underscored their areas’ unique cultural attributes as crucial parts of local business climate.
The role of cultural fit in the selection of HQ2 reflects scholars’ and corporate leaders’ growing acknowledgement of the importance of local culture to sustaining successful companies, particularly those in the high-technology sector where innovation plays a large role (Cleave et al., 2016, Davis and Dingel, 2019, Florida, 2012). However, research on high-technology (henceforth referred to as tech) growth has measured local culture indirectly through demographic variables such as language variety (Ottaviano & Peri, 2005), immigrant density (Ager & Brückner, 2013), and ethnic/racial diversity (Sparber, 2010). These studies define local culture through the diverse origins and backgrounds of residents. In contrast to the focus on demographic composition, research on place branding has analyzed discourse and public perceptions of cities (Balmer et al., 2019, Cleave and Arku, 2015, Sadeque et al., 2019, Taecharungroj, 2019, Vuignier, 2017). These studies define local culture through affective description of cities’ reputations and sense-of-place. Yet, research on place branding has focused almost exclusively on single locations or a small number of cities, limiting the generalizability of this concept. This study builds on existing place branding literature by identifying and describing the multiple dimensions of place brands across an expansive number of cities. It then examines how these dimensions shape local climates for tech growth, using a method that allows for large-scale comparative research of place brands that emerge in discourse about cities’ reputations.
This study uses latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a form of topic modelling, to identify place brand dimensions that emerge in travel guide descriptions of 133 U.S. cities. LDA enables the examination of place brands across a large comparative sample of cities to identify common themes in local reputations, an advancement from previous studies that have focused primarily on place brands in a small number of locations. Five dominant place brand dimensions are identified that occur at varying levels across cities: Revitalization, Gastro Hubs, Local Centers, Vibrancy, and History and the Arts. This study then examines how place brand dimensions relate to tech growth. Focusing on the post-recession expansion years of 2010 through 2016, the results suggest that cities where Vibrancy is most salient have experienced the most tech growth, measured by increasing tech employment and a growing number of tech firms. This study suggests that cities’ with a vibrant atmosphere are best positioned to attract tech investment.
This article is organized as follows: The first section provides a review of research on place brands and illustrates the usefulness of this concept for understanding the conditions which may attract or foster tech growth. The next section presents a description of the methodological approach, highlighting LDA’s unique advantage in examining and comparing place brands across a broad number of locations. In the third section, the results of the LDA are reported to describe the place brand dimensions of U.S. cities. This section also provides illustrative examples of cities that epitomize each dimension. The fourth section presents an examination of how the salience of each place brand dimension relates to local tech growth. This study concludes with a discussion of the managerial and theoretical implications as well as limitations and directions for future research.
Section snippets
Place brands
Places brands have been defined as the affective associations people have with a particular location (Micevski et al., 2020, Zenker et al., 2017), widespread reputations of an area (Bose, Roy, Alwi, & Nguyen, 2018), a sense-of-place felt toward a region (Cleave & Arku, 2017), and the expectations people hold for a place as being unique from other places (Vanolo, 2017). These definitions of place brands describe the intangible character of a location that exist beyond local infrastructure. As
Latent Dirichlet allocation and place brands
Advances in computational social science have expanded researchers’ ability to analyze and extract information from a growing number of online and administrative data sources (Berger et al., 2019, Taecharungroj, 2019). Specifically, natural language processing (NLP) offers several advantages for place brand research, allowing scholars to analyze and extract patterns from textual data where place brands are explicitly communicated or conveyed. Scholars are increasingly taking advantage of these
Place brand topics
Model fit statistics from the LDA of cities’ Lonely Planet Travel Guide entries (see Appendix A) suggest that the place brands of U.S. cities can be described across five dimensions. In this section, word frequencies and topic distributions across cities are used to assign meanings to each place brand dimension. Fig. 2 reports word frequencies with word clouds illustrating the 50 most common word stems for each dimension. In each word cloud, word sizes are weighted by the probability of each
Discussion
Cities’ place brands convey reputations and the sense-of-place associated with a particular location (Bose et al., 2018, Vuignier, 2017). Existing research has shown that local place brands have major consequences in shaping individuals’ perceptions of an area as well as economic outcomes such as local investment and inter-firm collaboration (Cleave et al., 2016, Oliveira, 2015, Ryu and Swinney, 2011). Collectively, this literature highlights what many residents themselves know to be true:
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Yegyu Han for her assistance in data management, Yandou Lu for her assistance in reference management, and Juncai Jiang for his feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. The authors also thank Associate Editor Cleopatra Veloutsou and the anonymous reviewers for their insight and support throughout the review process.
William J. Scarborough is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His research examines local cultural dynamics across the U.S. His recent work appears in Gender, Work & Organization, Demography, and Social Science Research.
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William J. Scarborough is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His research examines local cultural dynamics across the U.S. His recent work appears in Gender, Work & Organization, Demography, and Social Science Research.
Rowena Crabbe is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include Black entrepreneurs, corporate social activism, and fitness and technology.