City branding in China: The case of Beijing and Shanghai

Abstract

[eng] Tourism branding is an important strategy for tour operators to emphasize the personality of their products or service and enhance the attractiveness to tourists. City branding takes cities as an object and tries to excavate the most distinctive tourism resources in each city for promoting the development of city tourism. However since each city has different characteristics, the specific methods of branding are different. In this academic thesis, we take two different Chinese first-tier cities - Beijing and Shanghai as examples, introduce their different characteristics of tourism resources and industry development and then give suggestions to their city branding according to the basic theory of tourism branding. The main target of this thesis is to explore the general rules of city tourism branding through analyzing the successes and failures during the process of application of branding.