OPPORTUNITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF ONLINE PLACE BRANDING STRATEGIES IN A CIRCULAR ECONOMY CONTEXT.

This study aims to clarify the ways in which the authorities involved in place brand management choose to use new technologies to communicate their online identity, within a broader context, defined by circular economy. We focused on a methodology repository, applying an already validated instrument, which could generate standardized and comparable results, from previous research, addressing the online identity of place brands issue. However, exploring contextualization, which is now mandatory for place brands in the online environment, has imposed a ‘technology transfer’, a multidisciplinary vision, leading to the integration of more conceptual and methodological frameworks, specific to multiple sectors: circular economy, political communication, corporate marketing and place branding. In order to achieve the research objective, we opted for using a descriptive-explanatory type of research, following a nonprobability sampling technique, having a predefined goal based on a corpus consisting of the official websites of six regional brands. As a quantitative-qualitative alternative, content analysis was chosen as a research method for the communication content, while the work technique consisted of frequency analysis applied to a category/ coding grid. The results have shown that the authorities responsible for the management of place brands do not communicate all of the characteristics of a place brand’s identity to the users/ visitors on their official websites; however, these authorities tend to present informing and brand communication elements more frequently than those regarding brand behavior in the online environment, leading to a set of limits specific to web analysis and partially confirming the approached circular economy frameworks, seen as opportunities regarding their implementation on websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]