Sebastian Zenker

Copenhagen Business School · Department of Marketing

This study introduces the evolutionary concept of assortative sociality and explores how it moderates pandemic anxiety effects on attitudes towards tourism and travel decisions. Based on a large-scale online survey (N = 4630) conducted in three European countries, we demonstrate that COVID-19 anxiety triggered assortative sociality, which reflects...

For several years, the Brexit has been an ongoing political crisis with high uncertainty that nonetheless affects us in many ways. Until now, the academic debate has mainly emphasized the political, economic and legal consequences, while disregarding the social-psychological effects of the crisis. This article examined the relationships between tru...

Measuring teaching quality is challenging to say the least. Each instructor brings his/her training, experience, style, and capabilities to the classroom, making it notoriously difficult to establish a fair teaching quality metric. Commonly used metrics such as student evaluations are one-dimensional and cannot possibly capture all teaching quality...

After hotels in many countries were forced to close in government-imposed lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an inherent need to communicate how they deal with the coronavirus to motivate guests to visit. However, lack of knowledge about how to persuasively communicate about hotels’ cleaning programs for COVID-19 can challenge the ind...

Pandemics are affecting tourism in many ways. Being a niche research field before, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic created a strong urgency to develop this topic. For researching pandemic-induced changes in tourist beliefs and travel behaviour, we developed a construct that measures the intra-personal anxiety of travellers (and non-travellers):...

Unquestionable, the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is one of the most impactful events of the 21st century and has tremendous effects on tourism. While many tourism researchers worldwide are currently ‘Covid-19 research gap spotting’, we call for more deliberateness and rigor. While we agree that the coronavirus pandemic is unique and relevant to...

The current refugee crisis has broad ramifications for societies. In the domain of tourism, such socio-political or human-made disasters raise questions about security, but may also affect perceptions of a destination's openness and hospitality. This paper discusses the relative importance of security and openness in terms of destination image and...

Jede Stadt verfügt über eine Marke. Damit sind die Assoziationen zu der jeweiligen Stadt gemeint, die im Kopf der Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten verankert sind. Es wäre eine grobe ökonomische Nachlässigkeit, diese nicht zu nutzen. Ob die Marke erfolgreich ist, liegt dabei vor allem an der zugrunde liegenden Strategie: Hierfür braucht es 1) eine sol...

Purpose: City branding has gained popularity as governance strategy. However, the academic underpinning is still poor and city branding needs a more critical conceptualization, as well as more complex management systems. This paper challenges the use of ‘a one size fits all’ city brand, which is still common sense in many places. The paper proposes...

This article analyses whether involving various stakeholder groups in place marketing has effects on the content of place brands, and on how place marketing influences other policy fields, i.e. spatial planning and tourism/leisure policies. The research applies structural equation modelling to nationwide surveys in the Netherlands and Germany among...

This article explores how place reputation is affected by two strategies that are frequently incorporated in a strategic place branding framework. The first strategy is stimulating an open place brand process in which there are more than enough opportunities for an open debate and discussion in the process of developing and implementing a place bra...

Up till now, only few researchers have looked at the dynamics that develop when citizens' collective actions co-create and eventually co-destruct a city brand. This research paper analyzes the interplay between urban policies and grassroots city brand development during the refugee crisis that had its peak in autumn 2015 in Germany. We chose the ci...

This article contributes to a broader understanding of how the branding of places affects both residents and tourists. While branding often relies on simplified messages, the effectiveness of such strategies for complex brands remains questionable. Residents in particular possess a confounded knowledge of the place and could disagree with simplifie...

Place brand managers often disregard the complexity of place brands, as do their counterparts in the academic arena: they repeatedly use simple explorative descriptions of certain place brands, rather than a precise measurement. Thus, this chapter aims to identify and discuss measurement approaches that could prove useful in place branding. Theref...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a special session entitled “Place branding: Are we wasting our time?”, held at the American Marketing Association’s Summer Marketing Educators’ conference in 2014. Design/methodology/approach – The report details the outcome of an Oxford-style debate with two opposing teams of two persons – one t...

Although many brand managers favor the use of celebrities in advertisements, others worry that celebrities overshadow the brand and thus impair brand recall. Practitioners refer to this overshadowing as the vampire effect, defined as a decrease in brand recall for an advertising stimulus that features a celebrity endorser versus the same stimulus w...

The pervasive managerial logic of branding has established a stable foothold in the context of place management. Yet the question of whether places, such as cities, regions and nations, can be effectively managed using marketing techniques remains elusive, as place brands and company brands have been observed to differ in various ways. A key charac...

Place branding is an inherently difficult venture, since places are complex systems of geographical abstractions, each one understood in relation and contrast to other geographical entities. Even at the smallest size – a district, town, or city – a place is quite complex, but it becomes even more challenging when the entity exists on a higher level...

Purpose – This paper aims to develop a participatory approach to place branding. In doing so, it offers guidance on how to implement a participatory place branding strategy within place management practice. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on theoretical insights drawn from the combination of distinct literatures on place branding,...

Even though satisfaction is a main research topic in many disciplines (especially in marketing and organizational studies), surprisingly few attempts have been made to discern the role of satisfaction in the field of urban research, at least compared to other concepts such as place attachment. The aim of this paper is to empirically show the role o...

Places invest an extensive amount of taxpayers’ money into their branding activities. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a proper success measurement that can capture whether or not taxpayer money is being efficiently and effectively used to create place brand equity. Unfortunately, place brand equity (in general) and place brand image chang...

Values are an important concept in marketing because they comprise part of peoples’ identity and can thus help marketers separate and target different audiences. Unsurprisingly, places and their marketing initiatives increasingly try to appeal to (potential) residents’ identity by communicating core values. While the notion of value congruence is n...

Research from social and environmental psychology has shown that identification by residents with a place leads to numerous desirable outcomes like increased commitment and residential satisfaction. Thus, in the competition for residents, cities focus on building a favorable identity of a place to increase identification with the place. However, li...

Adequate perception of bodily sensations is essential to protect health. However, misinterpretation of signals from within the body is common and can be fatal, for example, in asthma or cardiovascular disease. We suggest that placing interoceptive stimuli into interoceptive categories (e.g., the category of symptoms vs. the category of benign sensa...

Cities invest large sums of money in ‘flagship projects’, with the aim of not only developing the city as such, but also changing the perceptions of the city brand towards a desired image. The city of Hamburg, Germany, is currently investing 575 million in order to build a new symphony hall (Elbphilharmonie), 400 million to develop the ‘Internation...

Where is the best place to live? The answer depends on how we ask the question and which scale we apply. Our study offers two contributions to the increasing comparability of research on citizen satisfaction: First, it combines together 18 different scales with items derived from qualitative research and then reduces those items to a set of 21 ques...

Purpose Cities increasingly compete with each other for attracting tourists, investors, companies, or residents. Marketers therefore focus on establishing the city as a brand, disregarding that the perception and knowledge of a city differ dramatically between the target audiences. Hence, place branding should emphasize much more the perceptions of...

Purpose – This paper deals with the importance of residents within place branding. The aim of this paper is to examine the different roles that residents play in the formation and communication of place brands and explores the implications for place brand management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on theoretical insights drawn fr...

Today cities are in strong competition for companies, tourists, and most of all talents. In order to differentiate one city from another, place marketers increasingly focus on establishing the city as a brand and adopt marketing techniques in order to identify competitors and analyze the impact of their brand image. Thus, the authors provide an ana...

John, Loken, Kim, and Monga (2006) have introduced brand concept maps (BCM) as a powerful approach to measure brand image according to the structure of the underlying brand association networks and reveal the strength and uniqueness of brand associations. Interestingly, BCM as well as other consumer mapping techniques do not include explicit measur...

Purpose – To develop a city, officials frequently invest a great deal of taxpayers' money in large‐scale place development projects, which are often sparsely supported by the citizens because such projects often lead to unwanted effects (such as gentrification). This results in conflicts between planners and citizens, which are expressed in public...

Purpose – The branding of places has gained popularity among city officials in recent years. Unfortunately, place marketers often disregard the complexity of place brands, as do their counterparts in the academic discussion: the focus repeatedly falls on the simple explorative description of certain city brands, rather than a proper conceptualizati...

As the competition between them increases, cities focus more and more on establishing themselves as brands. Consequently, cities invest an extensive amount of taxpayers' money into their marketing activities. Unfortunately, cities still lack a proper success measurement, which has raised questions regarding the efficient and effective use of taxpay...

Nowadays cities compete strongly with each other for attracting tourists, investors, companies, or talents. Place marketers therefore try to establish the place as a brand, promoting it to different audiences. But the perception of a place (brand) differs between those potential 'customers' and a conceptual foundation is still missing. Following a...

The number of cities claiming to make use of branding has been growing considerably in the last decade. Competition is one of the key drivers for cities to establish their place as a brand and promoting that place to visitors, investors, companies and residents. Unfortunately, place marketers often believe that the place brand is a controllable and...

The aim of this paper is to determine why and under which condition residents enter into a strong and committed relationship with their place of living. We will present a model which outlines how cities could strengthen the resident-city identification by increasing the perceived place complexity. The model translates the Customer Relationship Mana...

Why do people feel bound to a place? Why do they want to leave their city? Numerous studies have addressed these questions indirectly by, for example, asking for descriptions of “the best place to live at”. Finding the answer is not as simple as the question itself, because no applied measurement scales exist to assess the attachment of people to t...

Purpose Today we have to face the challenge of competing in a globalized world for scarce goods, such as residents in general, and in particular for those with talents, the so‐called “creative class”. This class is the driving force for economic growth, so winning the competition for these individuals is one of the main tasks for cities and regions...

In an effort to explain leadership effectiveness, contemporary theories of leadership take subordinates’ expectations and beliefs about leaders and the leadership process more and more into account. This paper provides an overview on the fairly new, so called “follower-centric” research. We explain the cognitive information processing mechanisms th...

Two large online surveys were conducted among employees in Germany to explore the importance employees and organizations place on aspects of interpersonal respect in relation to other work values. The first study (N = 589) extracted a general ranking of work values, showing that employees rate issues of respect involving supervisors particularly hi...

Two large online surveys were conducted among employees in Germany to explore the importance employees and organizations lay on aspects of interpersonal respect in relation to other work values. The first study (N1 = 589) extracted a general ranking of work values, showing that issues of respect which involve supervisors are rated particularly high...