Place branding is seriously studied in various academic disciplines. Its impact on strategic development plays a vital role in processes of sustainable urban transformation. Place branding originated in tourism management and over time its research focus spilled over and evolved in environmental science, urban studies and public administration. Scholars and policy makers are currently faced with a myriad of concepts in place branding research, which show considerable overlap but should be carefully distinguished from each other. To increase our understanding of this body of research, this article observes a strong pattern of the concepts in use, in their references to location types (i.e. urban, city, destination, place) and broadcasting activities (branding, marketing, promotion). It builds on this observation by collecting studies from the Scopus database by location type and broadcasting activities (LT–BA) reference pairs and systematically analysing and reviewing these from 1980 to 2018. A total of 2,665 articles and reviews were identified and analysed based on (1) occurrences per reference pair, (2) co-occurrences per reference pair, and (3) co-occurrences for each reference pair with other concepts. On that basis, the origin and evolution of the research field including multiple reference pairs in use is explored and described. @en

Recently, place branding has received increasing attention from both academic and policy circles. As place branding is an interdisciplinary field, scholars from different backgrounds have contributed to the research. Previous literature review studies have summarized the key disciplines in place branding fields, including urban studies, marketing, tourism, and public management. The goal of this work is to examine the impact of influencing factors on the case selection pattern in place branding literature from 2014 to 2018. First, we raise seven hypotheses about the case selection mechanism from perspectives of branding strategies (public management field), marketing strategies (marketing field), urban characteristics (urban studies), tourism attraction (tourism field), and scholar proximity (other factors), respectively. Second, we test the proposed hypotheses in aggregated cases and comparative cases using Poisson regression and qualitative comparative analysis. We found that the previous focus of city branding study was on Europe, and more attention has started to be paid to North America, Asia, and Oceania in the last 5 years. As for influencing factors, we observe that the scholar proximity is significantly related to the case selection, while urban characteristics, branding strategies, marketing strategies, and tourist attractions are less influential.@en