Sentiment Analysis and City Branding

The Web is a huge virtual space where to express and share individual opinions, influencing any aspect of life, with implications for marketing and communication alike. Social Media are already an important marketing arena. This paper describes, on one hand, the characteristics of Sentiment Analysis and, on the other hand, the results of its application to an empirical research on the city of Bologna and on its brand perception on the Web. In the international scenario a growing number of cities compete with each other in order to attract: investors and foreign companies; different types of tourists, and new residents. City branding can be considered the starting point for developing effective policy of city marketing. The Bologna City Branding Project aims at increasing the effectiveness of territorial marketing policies carried out by the municipality of Bologna. This study partially confirms and partially rejects what many sectors of the city would have expected from the perception of Bologna on the Web. From the point of view of academic research, it has shown the potential of Sentiment Analysis in the study of perception of the city brand. Further investigations should be made to integrate this approach with the more qualitative and quantitative techniques. From the point of view of the place marketing of cities, the results of this research have shown that place marketing is a complex activity and that, in order to be more effective, an integrated plurality of approaches have to be promoted and used.