برند در حال ظهور شهر شانگهای : مطالعه ادراکات تصویر در میان خارجی ها

The World Expo 2010 was a pivotal event aimed at demonstrating that Shanghai is an attractive, modern and comfortable city, infused with traditional Chinese values and ready to compete for talent and investments with other global cities. Through a netnographic analysis of online discussion forums for foreigners residing in, or visiting Shanghai, this study documents the attitudes of these online community members towards life in this city. These attitudes are identified as predominantly negative with an emphasis on pollution, congestion and rudeness of the local population. This study thus identifies a dissonance between the officially communicated brand identity and the word-of-mouth communication on social media. This paper proceeds to recommend leveraging the identified positive aspects of Shanghai's image such as excitement, affordability and safety for future branding efforts.