Skip to main content

Place Branding Nantes

 Place Branding starts with inquiry 

Reading the conference paper of António Azevedo (Azevedo 2009) I realise from his methods that I need to ask people who live in Nantes, why they love or hate their city.  This is technically, the first step in a Place Branding exercise.  Place Branding starts with an inquiry into what the city already represents for its inhabitants.  I need to discover, 'What is Nantes?'  Only, then can I begin to unpick the components of what has value.  But how do I determine what has value for a respondent to my research question? André Breton declares in his surrealist novel, Nadja (1928), that Nantes is (quoted in Garrett 2010, 193) 'perhaps, with Paris, the only town in France where I had the impression that something worthwhile could happen to me.'  Martin Garrett explains that André Breton was sent to Nantes in July 1915, to work as a medical auxiliary at 2 rue du Bocage (Garrett 2010, 193); that is almost exactly 100 years ago.




Close-reading of André Breton

There are three key turns of phrase in Breton's statement, 'had the impression', 'something worthwhile' and 'could happen to me'. These positions need to be distilled into a question or prompt to locals, and possibly, later to visitors to Nantes.  

« Nantes : peut-être avec Paris la seule ville de France où j'ai l'impression que peut m'arriver quelque chose qui en vaut la peine, où certains regards brûlent pour eux-mêmes de trop de feux (je l'ai constaté encore l'année dernière, le temps de traverser Nantes en automobile et de voir cette femme, une ouvrière, je crois, qu'accompagnait un homme, et qui a levé les yeux : j'aurais dû m'arrêter), où pour moi la cadence de la vie n'est pas la même qu'ailleurs, où un esprit d'aventure au-delà de toutes les aventures habite encore certains êtres, Nantes, d'où peuvent encore me venir des amis, Nantes où j'ai aimé un parc : le parc de Procé. »

 




References

Azevedo, A. (2009) 'Are you proud to live here? A residents oriented place marketing audit (attachment, self-esteem and identity)' Minho University, Braga, Portugal.

Breton, A., (1928) Nadja, Paris: NRF.

Garrett, M. (2010) The Loire: A Cultural History, Oxford: OUP.

Freire, J. (2009) 'Local People a critical dimension for place brands' Journal of Brand Management 16, 420-438. 





 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you. Please do a SHARE too...

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Call for chapters

  Call for chapters   Sustainable Narratives and Technologies in Tourism What will tourism look like in the 2030s? Tourism destination development will take sustainability as a given. Social media and emerging technologies will be integrated in the stories of co-created visitor experience. Are you working in these converging areas?   Following the success of our research monograph with Routledge and its teaching companion, we are looking for contributors for a new collection. Follow this webpage for updates, please https://travelwritersonline.blogspot.com/2025/05/call-for-chapters.html Please scroll right down for updates... Book production timeline continued at the end of this page... Click to view   Download free eBook   Chapters of up to 8000 words, including references. Each chapter to explore a tourism or hospitality development as a case study with details of underpinning theory. Provide example qu...
12 comments
Read more

PhD in Contemporary Travel Writing

 PhD in Contemporary Travel Writing Syddansk Universitet Writing Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Mobility and Authenticity in the Planetary Emergency Travel is older than human civilization itself. Migration, trade, tourism and pilgrimage, all are forms of human movement that have existed for millennia. Yet travel is no longer what it used to be. Slow travel, flight shame, sustainable travel, eco- and anti-tourism, staycation and microadventures are but some of many recent terms testifying to a growing awareness that mobility has become inextricably intertwined with planetary concerns, regardless of whether it is the short distance of a commute to work, or that of long-distance globetrotting. With 2024 likely proving to be the hottest year on record and tourists evacuated by boat from uncontrollable forest fires on Rhodes in 2023, all the while tech billionaires promise us trips to Mars and hotels on the moon (while others perish trying to reach the Titanic), we are also told t...
2 comments
Read more

Literary Caen and the Channel Ports

Thursday morning, 27th July 2023. The research project on slow tourism for the Channel ports is still very much in Step 1, the Library Stage. The earliest step in our process methodology using the book for travel researchers. In the last few days, though, a literary connection with the city of Caen has begun to emerge. It's exciting enough to report here on Travel Writers Online. Using dialogue journaling a trustworthy link has been established with a fellow blogger, Claude at the blog Livres d'un jour . Claude had published a review of a detective novel, Canicule sanglante (2022) by Pierre Guinot-Delery (b.1949).  The title would translate as The Bloody Heatwave . The review starts like this: " The city of Caen is suffocating under the effect of a heat wave. One morning, the body of the vice-president of the chamber of commerce and business leader is found dead in front of the courthouse." That was enough to make me order a copy from Amazon. It's due to arri...
8 comments
Read more