Brand attitudes of entrepreneurs as a stakeholder towards a city

Abstract

City branding has been emerging in branding literature. In this perspective, cities can be branded as well as a product or a service. Moreover, stakeholders play critical role in branding process of a city. In a city, there are various stakeholders like visitors, residents, public institutes and non-governmental organizations. As different stakeholders may have different city brand attitudes, the purpose of the study is to examine the brand attitudes of entrepreneurs towards Mugla province with structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings of the structural model indicate that nature, business opportunities and networking, and governmental services affect the attitudes of entrepreneurs whereas local transportation, accessibility of the city, social bonding, cultural and shopping activities do not. Additionally, there is a tight relation between the attitudes and behavioral intentions of entrepreneurs regarding the city brand. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.