International public relations and place branding in the context of integrated rhetoric: Turkey tourism promotion

Efforts to survive in the global world surpassed the dimension of being a problem only for products and brands and created a new competition arena for places as well. Places are also implementing branding activities in order to maintain their stable life and to be able to survive under competitive global conditions. This thesis reveals the ultimate conditions for a place to be a brand and in this frame, propounds methods that it may apply in the fields of communication, marketing and public diplomacy. Especially, with the creation of the place branding attraction pyramid, it was discovered that the required conditions were met for a place to be a brand after the correct analysis and planning of each step of the pyramid by having regard to the place brand capital field. The second significant innovative approach of the thesis is the concept of integrated rhetoric. The study defines the concept of integrated rhetoric in detail, develops its components, and makes an analysis by considering it as an integrated rhetorical method of analysis in the communication step of the place branding attraction pyramid. The assumption in introducing the concept of integrated rhetoric has proven that the use of visual, linguistic and emotional rhetorical elements as a whole in communication, promotion and public relations activities is a much more effective method of persuasion rather than using them alone. In the second part, the study determines the rules of the mental processing system of the elements used in the visual promotional materials. In this context, 40 people were interviewed with depth interview, and a survey was conducted with 241 people through method of snowball sampling with the aim of testing how the parameters determined in creating brand value could work in the integrated rhetoric. The questionnaires were prepared according to the five point likert scale, however, during evaluation, some answers were checked and interpreted with the help of SPSS program by degrading them in three point likert. The thesis analyzes four promotional images of Turkey within the place branding attraction pyramid, through all the components developed in the framework of the study. In conclusion, integrated rhetoric, in which visual and linguistic elements are integrated with emotional elements in tourism promotion, will gain a groundbreaking quality in the field of communication and will be a favorite method to be used in persuasion.