City Brand Positioning in Urban Agglomeration: Samples of 8 cities in Yangtze River Delta

It turns more and more important for a city to create a brand under the severe inter-urban competition. Brand positioning is crucial for city brand. Based on forerunner´s research achievement and the experimental results, especially on the city brand positioning with full use of city resource endowment, this paper emphasizes on the research of city brand position under urban agglomeration through learning target audience (investors, travelers and immigrants) perception of city, comparing with target audience perception of rival cities, and analyzing characteristics of urban agglomeration development. Compared with the similarity and difference of concerns among the investors, travelers and immigrants, we summarize the attributes of city brand positioning, improve the IPA methods by factor analysis, and put forward FPM/UA methods and strategy under urban agglomeration. We exert the improved IPA methods to make statistics and comparative analysis of 8 selected cities in Yangtze river delta as examples. Finally, we respectively put forward detailed suggestions on brand positioning of 8 sample cities by FPM/UA methods and strategy.