Ioana S. Stoica

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing at University of Bedfordshire

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the in situ place experiences of people in Luton and Darlington. Design/methodology/approach The study used 109,998 geotagged tweets from Luton and Darlington between 2020 and 2022 and conducted topic modelling using latent Dirichlet allocation. Lexicons were created using GPT-4 to evalua...

Co-creation in place branding is used as an umbrella term for the complex brand meaning emerging through stakeholders’ participation in place activities, their contribution, collaborations and interchange of ideas and resources. Co-creation is often an aspiration for places to create and promote their brands collectively. In this context, storytell...

Study Background and Research Gap In consideration of place branding as a more holistic and integrated concept, current research in the field underlines “collective branding” or “place brand co-creation” to define a collaborative process for creating and promoting place brands (Vallaster & von Wallpach, 2013; Vallaster, von Wallpach & Zenker, 2018)...

Study Background and Main Arguments Over the past two decades, and marking an evolution in the branding literature, the meanings associated with brands and their perceived values have been linked to brand co-creation activities. Referred to as ‘a new conceptual logic’, brands are viewed as an outcome of a collective and collaborative co-creation pr...