A research about perspectives on city image and city branding: The case of Kütahya city

There are thousands of cities in the world and when one considers the necessity of hyper-rivalry because of today's global, economic and political conditions, branding of a city is inevitable. A city's image directly affects people's perceptions on that city. Creation of city's image and branding is a process that spreads the city's strong and positive features as well as its specific characteristics to the targeted population and that aims to create effective tools. The actual purpose behind the city branding is increasing both the popularity of the city and the investments on it by improving an admirable city image, attracting visitors and by associating the city with the desired features. When the literature is examined, it is seen that determiners of people's perceptions of a city is the compilation of the experiences that emerges alongside the relations that begins with the first encounter with the city. In the light of this information, when analyzing the city branding and image of Kütahya, perceptions of Kütahya citizens were taken into consideration. In the application section, 545 people who lives in Kütahya participated our survey, the obtained data was examined by SPSS software. In the analysis section, participant's frequency distribution was calculated and Independent Samples T-Test, Analysis of Variance, analysis of correlation between scales was applied. The basic aim of this study is to demonstrate the importance of city branding and city image and to evaluate the perception of city image and branding of Kütahya.