City Branding and New Media

Linguistic Perspectives, Discursive Strategies and Multimodality

M. Paganoni

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137387967
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores city branding in the public sector as an aspect of e-governance from a privileged linguistic, discursive and semiotic perspective. It analyses how local administrations and public bodies engage their stakeholders by addressing key issues such as active citizenship, social inclusion and promotion of cultural heritage and events.

1

City Websites as a Multimodal Genre

Abstract: Official websites have become a necessary strategic tool in a city’s brand development and communication agenda, though their codification as a multimodal genre is still undertheorised. The chapter pinpoints the visual, verbal and navigational features of city websites that may be said to define them as a specific digital genre by reason of their occurrence and regularity. The case study is the Manchester City Council website, due to the leading role of the UK within Europe in the field of digital inclusion policies and to the recent successful redesign of the site itself. Drawing from Bateman’s Genre and Multimodality model, the analysis retrieves recognisable overcoded generic features in the service-oriented interface of a municipal website, reassessing the importance of citizen-centric communication for urban e-governance.

Paganoni, Maria Cristina. City Branding and New Media: Linguistic Perspectives, Discursive Strategies and Multimodality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137387967.0005.

1.1Study design

This chapter intends to analyse city websites from a genre perspective, reflecting upon the creation of webpages dedicated to the so-called ‘city brand’ and choosing to focus on British cities, as the United Kingdom is at the forefront of digital innovation in the public sector in Europe. In particular, the case study here discussed is the website of Manchester City Council,¹ the local authority government of the city and of Greater Manchester, an urban area characterised by a cutting-edge digital environment and aiming to become one of the world’s top 20 Digital Cities by 2020. According to a group of independent experts, ‘Manchester is currently the second largest digital cluster in Europe after London and has the potential to become one of Europe’s most important digital centres’.² The sustained rebranding efforts undergone by the municipality recently included the highly successful redesign of the council website itself (West, 2013) in order to make it simpler and more mobile-friendly. It is a real-life example of local government innovation, especially in a period of budget reduction strategies.³

The notion of the city as embodying a brand and being endowed with unique personality, history, people, values and attractions, has been elaborated in recent years by place branding practitioners, and, above all, Simon Anholt, who claims that ‘in today’s globalised world, every city must compete with every other city for its share of the world’s tourists, investors, talent, cultural exchange, business visitors, events and media profile’.⁴ The creation of the City Brands Index⁵ hinges on this perspective that stresses interurban competition.

The importance of place branding can be ascribed to the fact that intangibles (such as urban brands) play a central role in the circulation of commodities in the symbolic economies of our knowledge-based society (Lash and Urry, 1994), in which ‘the exchange of capitals hinges on the promotion of ideals, images and lifestyles in discourse’ (Aiello and Thurlow, 2006, p. 149). As artefacts that well emblematise the constitutive power of semiosis, city websites rely on what has been defined (Baldry and Thibault, 2006) the simultaneous co-deployment of multiple linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic resources (words, still and moving images, sounds, design, layout etc.), which works towards an expansion of meaning.

City branding reflects the recurrent phenomenon of the interpenetration of public and corporate discourse (Koller, 2008) in the public sphere, particularly at the level of local government and organisations, as well as the increasing interurban competition, favoured by the speed and ubiquity of web communication, that is taking place globally. Part of today’s urban policies therefore consists of planning, developing and sustaining an adequate brand concept whose most direct result is the creation of a viable visual identity and a sustainable brand narrative.

City websites have therefore become a necessary strategic tool in a city’s brand development, communication agenda and urban governance. In truth, given the multifaceted nature of a city and what it has to offer, it most frequently happens that the city is promoted on several official websites, which are subsidised by different urban stakeholders sharing a common engagement in urban life (local administration, public-private partnership, business) at the same time and are thus networked among each other by means of external linking. The most characteristic case is provided by official tourism websites that are regularly referred to in the tourism section of municipal websites, so that, for example, users from MCC are invited to access Visit Manchester.

In terms of the standardisation of digital text types within web-mediated communication, city websites are a very good example of genre creation out of the diverse communicative needs of a given social context (Hyland, 2002) and, in this specific case, of the demand for semiotic artefacts that will prove capable of accomplishing specific social policies. As has been observed, ‘policy solutions increasingly tend to circulate, migrate and mutate on an international scale and with growing speed’ (Vanolo, 2014, p. 886). The fact that city websites can be said to follow a recognisable template in the age of globalisation is also understandable: less known cities and towns try to develop their web presence around the successful website models of large cities that have enough funds to hire capable brand consultants and information scientists.

A city portal is more than a lightweight information space and social community. It should enable and facilitate the collaborative work and information sharing between professional applications, systems and residents. The portal users include public departments and their officers, businesses and their employees, and civilian residents. The information includes space data, geographic data and circumstance data. The provided services include city planning, management and decision making such as transportation planning, residential planning, industry planning, and education planning. (Zhu et al., 2009, p. 2609)

This observable convergence towards conventions of content on the spur of real needs seems to provide further evidence of the claim that ‘genre mediates between the social and the semiotic’ (Kress, 2010, p. 116), that is, that genres respond to recurring communicative situations. With this in mind the purpose of this chapter is to provide a multimodal analysis of city websites and to name and identify their formal features as distinctive of a socially recognisable digital genre. It aims to expand on a recent study (Paganoni, 2012a) in the field of city branding that focussed on municipal webpages opened by local governments within what is now a widespread modernisation agenda in the UK and all over Europe. As mentioned before, however, since a municipal website is not the only site on which a city brand is put to use, and since urban actors involve multiple public and private stakeholders, this analysis intends to enlarge its scope by looking at how a local government website is networked to other webpages while addressing the following research question: what are the recurrent visual and verbal elements that contribute to the construction of the specific genre of the city council website?

To this purpose, while centred on municipal websites as the main object of analysis, this chapter will keep in mind the role and impulse of other city-related sites that showcase the activities of appointed brand consultants and urban identity think tanks, resulting in the formulation of captivating brand claims (e.g., ‘Edinburgh Inspiring Capital’; ‘Leeds, Live It, Love It’; ‘Manchester Original Modern’).

1Marketing Edinburgh Ltd is a public/private body set up to lead and facilitate the promotion of Edinburgh. It brings together leading businesses and organisations to promote the city through fresh co-ordinated planning and to enhance Edinburgh’s reputation as a place to visit, invest, live, work and study. (‘Marketing Edinburgh’, Edinburgh Inspiring Capital)⁶

2Leeds and Partners is the strategic organisation responsible for attracting inward investment, supporting trade, promoting tourism, and raising the profile of the city. Our focus is on driving sustainable economic growth, creating jobs, and promoting Leeds as a vibrant, dynamic and competitive city, which operates as the powerhouse of Yorkshire as well as having global reach. (Leeds and Partners)⁷

3Marketing Manchester is the agency charged with promoting the City on a national and international stage. We aim to develop the Manchester city-region into a leading leisure, learning and business destination for domestic and international visitors, enhance the national and international reputation of the city-region and promote sustainable economic development and growth. Visit Manchester is the tourist board for the city-region and is a division of Marketing Manchester. (Marketing Manchester)⁸

As the quotations above show, these bodies, which often include local official tourist boards (see the mention of Visit Manchester in example 3), well illustrate the overlapping of corporate and public discourse, as the latter has been clearly hybridised by a marketing attitude, made manifest in the frequent references to investment, business and international competitiveness.

In the specific case of Manchester, the re-imaging of the city under the winning label of ‘Manchester Original Modern’⁹ – launched by expert Peter Saville in 2006 after a decade of elaboration of the concept from the perspective of a culture-led regeneration¹⁰ – has now become one of the thematic strands that are deeply engrained in the brand vision and icon, a multicoloured ‘M’ (examples 5 and 6). This refreshed Mancunian identity, in its turn, relies ‘on long standing narratives (first global city, entrepreneurial, open to change)’ and ‘on popular culture as symbolic of wider vibrancy and creativity’ (O’Connor, 2007).

4Original Modern is the brand vision for the Manchester City Region. This vision calls on the first industrial City to once again be original and modern in all that it does and seeks to do; it calls to mind the fact that we shaped the world once and will do so again. (A Tourism Strategy for Greater Manchester 2008–2013, 2008, p. 1)

5The ‘M’ is Manchester’s brand signifier. The strands of colour represent the richness and diversity of the City and the individuals within it, existing in parallel. Where those strands intersect the City becomes a truly exciting place. The people – original and modern – make Manchester. It is used for national and international communications, when City partners from across Greater Manchester and the wider city-region are promoting themselves jointly under a ‘Manchester’ banner. It shows one of Manchester’s biggest strengths – working together to make things happen (Marketing Manchester, original emphasis).

Born out of a real negotiation between entrepreneurial elite networks and popular culture, especially from the ‘Madchester’ music scene (O’Connor, 2007),¹¹ the ‘original modern’ concept still infuses policy documents such as the Manchester Way, that is, the Manchester Sustainable Community Strategy 2006–2015 (example 6), where storylines from different societal sectors are woven into an inclusive institutional narration.

6The Manchester Way is our Sustainable Community Strategy. It is delivered through actions that will benefit everyone who lives, studies, works in, or enjoys our original modern city. It will improve Manchester’s economic, social and environmental fabric. (The Manchester Way, 2006, emphasis added)

Finally, as links to social networks, for example, Facebook and Twitter, just to name the two most popular, are now commonly embedded in civic websites, leading users to other branded webpages, the analysis carried out here will also represent a starting point for the following chapter, which will focus on how communicative flows and digital narratives migrate across different platforms and which issues, rhetorical strategies and discursive markers are recurrent.

1.2Methodological remarks and data set

Websites are page-based documents that assemble a variety of modes and discourses in order to create meaning. Though analytically exciting, this composite nature cannot be immediately interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction City Branding and New Media: Linguistic, Discursive and Semiotic Aspects
• 1  City Websites as a Multimodal Genre
• 2  E-Governance on the Web: Linguistic and Discursive Strategies
• 3  Branding Heritage, Digital Genres, Transmedia Storytelling
• 4  Expos and the Rhetoric of Sustainability
• Bibliography
• Index