Upstream and Downstream Participation in the Bologna City

Internationally, more and more cities are competing to attract investors, foreign companies, tourists, students, skilled workers, and talents. In the late 1990s, city marketing strategies were replaced by city branding, which expanded the target audience to include residents, with the aim of increasing their sense of belonging to the city. In 2013, the city of Bologna promoted a major city branding project to reposition its image through a generative brand identity. The construction of Bologna's new identity was developed in two stages: the study of the city's image perception at national and international level, and the management, communication, and promotion of the new generative brand. In this article, I have re-examined this city branding project within the framework of the New Marketing Paradigm and the H2H Marketing Model (Kotler et al. in H2H marketing. The genesis of human-to-human marketing. Springer, 2020), in order to verify whether the categories of upstream and downstream participation can be applied to the two stages. The study of the image of the city of Bologna was developed through two types of research: an original survey using a questionnaire and a knowledge mining technology to perform grammatical, logical, semantic, and sentiment analyses on 20,000 web posts containing the word “Bologna”. The research results identified the characteristics and digital micro-narratives expressed by visitors: Bologna as a city of art and culture, as a real city not overrun by tourists, with a friendly and lively atmosphere. The Municipality of Bologna used this data as a basis for the brief of the international competition for a new city brand. This use can be defined as upstream participation, since it was the result of a collaborative activity to define the characteristics of the new identity before the final choice. For this reason, the visitors who expressed their opinions about Bologna were the co-creators of the new identity. The branding project that won the international competition was the first co-generative city logo. The new visual identity system for Bologna was obtained by replacing the graphemes of the Latin alphabet with abstract signs designed using five figurative archetypes from the historical memory of the city of Bologna. This new graphic system allowed a wide range of people to contribute to the visual identity of Bologna by creating customized logos. The generative Bologna logo thus created an inclusive environment in which the thousands of logo users directly contributed to the dissemination of Bologna's new brand identity through the media and the web, in a logic of downstream participation. Through this creative use, users enhanced the visibility and reputation of the city. The city of Bologna was the beneficiary of this downstream participation. It can therefore be said that the upstream and downstream forms of participation were effectively applied to the Bologna City Branding project, which was carried out in a digital context where the human factor played a strategic role in the marketing repositioning of the Bologna brand.