Venice Behind the Scenes: An Exploratory Research on Place Perception of Venice Residents

Abstract

Venice is a medium-sized heritage European city and one of the most famous tourism cities in the world. When it comes to talk about Venice, the ‘overtourism narrative’ occupies a large part of the public attention and concerns. In the academic literature, it is often emphasized the importance of local residents for the place brand construction process. Nevertheless, in the place branding literature related to Venice, the attention reserved to local residents seems to always focus on how they influence the tourists’ experience, never examining the relationship between Venetians and the Venice brand. The case of Venice is definitely not a novelty for the place branding field, but unfortunately, the phenomenon of overtourism has obscured other ongoing urban processes. This research is conducted following an inductive approach and sheds some light on the perception that Venetians have of the brand of their city, and on the way they feel they contribute to the place brand construction process. This is done by conceptualizing the city of Venice using the City Branded House Strategy (Zenker & Braun, 2017), that allowed consideration and analysis of the place sub-brand dedicated to the intended audience. Data have been collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews having as point of departure the Citizen Satisfaction Index (Zenker et al., 2013) composed of four factors considered essential to define what makes a place a good place for living. Room has been left to the participants to introduce further important themes. Findings are limited to the participants of this research and show that, if we consider a brand as a source of competitive advantage to attract resources that have a long-term connotation, the sub-brand of Venice dedicated to its local residents reveals to fail at this purpose because the conversational ground where the brand and its audience meet is gradually vanishing. Local residents of the historical city center of Venice struggle to recognize themselves as the specific target group to which the sub-brand should be destined. Furthermore, participants do not recognize the brand as authentic because of a too fast change, resulting in the perception of a brand that failed to maintain the enduring nature of its identity – which should survive through potential evolutions. The current research represents a contribution to the field as it considers a new angle to look at the brand of the city of Venice. Furthermore, this thesis could work as a preliminary research, if Venetian public administration is to consider the implementation of the City Branded House Strategy and, theoretically, it contributes to fill the gap represented by the overlooking of a preliminary evaluation process before the elaboration of such a strategy.