Last Thursday, February 8th, Sara Vinyals Mirabent presented her doctoral thesis entitled "Building Urban Destination Brands in Europe. Re-conceptualizing the Relationship Between Brand Image and Brand Personality in Website Communication Practices", directed by Dr. Josep Fernández Cavia (Departament of communication). The jury formed by Dr. Mihalis Kavaratzis (University of Leicester), Dr. Rafael Pedraza Jiménez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Dr. Jordi de San Eugenio Vela (Universitat de Vic), qualified the thesis as Excellent, and granted her the Cum Laude distinction.

The research addressed the place branding topic, with a specific focus on destination image. In the author words: destinations must project a strong and differentiated brand image to position themselves in a competitive market. To this end, official websites have become a key instrument in the portrayal of the desired image and as the place where tourists expect to find everything about the destination. In this study, the official websites of the 12 most popular urban destinations in Europe were analyzed with a two-fold purpose: to describe their projected image, and to explore the relationship between brand image and brand personality in their discourse. The investigation combined three techniques in an exhaustive content analysis to assess the websites’ quality and the functional and symbolic dimensions of the projected image. The results highlighted cultural activities, tourist packages, and food and drink associations as the three core components of the European cities’ offer. Similarly, while all destinations project highly exciting personalities, the traits related to the other personality dimensions are those that differentiate the destinations in the competitive context. Finally, the study showed that some product-related associations are more likely to transmit specific personality traits.