Travel Writing in Place Branding - A Case Study on Nantes

: One of the main channels to communicate city branding, designed to attract British tourists for short breaks, is the travel section of the UK national press. With many newspapers now online for readers to browse, city branders have an accessible source of data to evaluate how their offer is presented. In this research, a collection of travel articles is analysed into themes for comparison with the elements used in place branding. The analysis discovers that 3 key elements used by commercial and academic place branders are not covered by contributors to the travel sections of the UK national press. The study is extended to explore how practices from academic research can be used in place-making to address these gaps.


INTRODUCTION
In this research, a collection of travel journalism is gathered from online sources by simulating the searching and browsing by a reader considering a short city break.The focus is on the French city of Nantes, on the river Loire, as a likely destination for UK visitors flying from Bristol or from Southampton.The content of the articles is analysed thematically for comparison with the elements used in place branding (Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė, 2013).The aim is to discover if the practice of travel journalism and city branding examine the same elements in the places they describe.If not, then which elements from place branding are not covered by writers for the travel sections of the UK national press?Recommendations are then made from the analysis to the main stakeholders involved in this communication process, including travel section editors and their travel writers, and destination managers, their branding analysts and their press officers.The analysis phase of place branding is well-documented in the academic literature (Azevedo, 2009;Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė, 2013).Azevedo presents a plan for asking residents what gives their city a better quality of life.This approach of eliciting the value and qualities of living in a city finds a parallel in the aims of promotional urban travel journalism.As the analysis stage of place branding is examined, it appears to provide ways of working with local knowledge that is also used for researching travel articles (McGaurr, 2012).Urban heritage tourism has already been shown to provide value or satisfaction for the visitor where strong place identity is coupled with continuity (Ginting & Wahid, 2015).Continuity resides in the heritage architecture of historic buildings and to some extent in the memories tourists have from spending time in clearly defined urban areas, for example, from dining there (Ginting & Wahid, 2015).The research phase of travel writing may be able to discover and make explicit the history of this heritage architecture since it is considered part of the tourism product and hence made visible through promotional work (McKercher, 2016), (Benur & Bramwell, 2015).The recovery of memories of time spent in urban space provides a greater methodological challenge, however, and may be too time-consuming or outside the scope of the writer for newspaper travel pages (Saunders & Moles, 2016).Thus the place brand that has been carefully researched and constructed by the destination management organisation may only be partially communicated to potential visitors.

Tourism Research that Examines the Role of Travel Writing in Tourism
A key area of research is attempting to discover where travel writing or literary writing has contributed to the increase in value of a place for visitors (Mansfield, 2015).Richards & Wilson (2004) propose that travel writers, and literary authors who write about their travel, for example, Kerouac (1922Kerouac ( -1969)), do influence tourists; their specific category is backpacking tourists.This raises the question of whether the tourist wants to retrace the journey or to emulate the life of the famous writer when they go on holiday.Writing offers a way of negotiating identity when new cultures are encountered by the visitor, whether the visitors are reading a piece of writing set in their holiday destination or writing a journal or blog for themselves.Published travel literature does change tourists' behaviours, for example Macaulay's (1949) Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal, is an example of travel writing becoming accidental promotional writing (Dann, 1999).The above analysis, although it uses the term travel writing to categorise the practices it examines, is more concerned with travel literature.It may be that the strong narratives contained within travel literature are a key feature that contribute to their use by tourists.The category of newspaper travel journalism is not analysed by the above research, leaving a gap in the knowledge on how the content of travel journalism can influence visitors.However, how these type of media-based travel articles are generated and their impact on destination image has been examined (Gladwell & Wolff, 1989;Dore & Crouch, 2003), "[These PR activities hosted by DMOs] may be known by a variety of names including press tours, visiting journalist programmes (VJPs) and travel writer or media familiarisation tours.They are all designed, however, to attract a variety of journalists, writers, film crews, documentary producers, etc, to a location to experience the tourism product and provide media exposure for a particular destination."(Dore & Crouch, 2003: 140) Little is available linking the more contemporary concept of place branding with travel articles from the national press, except for the work of Kubacki & Skinner (2006) which actually explores country branding through UK media travel articles.They put forward their justification for using 40 articles from UK broadsheets to examine brand in two steps: "[T]he national brand is communicated through a nation's geography, history, proclamations, entertainment industry and media, art and music, its famous citizens and other features, as well as through its culture, language, tourism and travel writing and its commercial branded products."(Kubacki & Skinner, 2006: 288) "Travel writing is a relevant data source as it tends 'to be more readily believed and accepted when the channel of communication used is itself a cultural artefact, rather than paid for media' citation from (Anholt 2002)" (Kubacki & Skinner, 2006: 288) To conclude this section, it can be seen that researchers do believe there is a causal link between travel writing, both in the form of travel articles from the media as well as travel literature from iconic travel writers, and the behaviour of tourists; this behaviour may be to encourage them to make destination choices or as visitors at the destination to make decisions on what to see and do in the city space.Value, pleasure and satisfaction are only mentioned in passing in the literature, the overarching consideration is motivation and place promotion to increase visitor numbers.However, a piece of travel writing is considered to have the status of a cultural artefact in itself (Anholt, 2002), and for that reason it can be assigned a value.Thus, the writing or the author provides leadership for the visitor on where to go and what to do in the urban space.

The Analysis Stage during Place Branding
Collecting data for the preparation of a new travel writing text finds a parallel in the preliminary stages of place branding consultancy exercises.At the outset of a place branding process local knowledge is elicited from internal stakeholders to understand which aspects of a place give its citizens a feeling of satisfaction, or pleasure.Participation in place branding, including the integration of local residents' voices is well-documented (Eshuis, Klijn & Braun, 2014;Zenker & Erfgen, 2014).The first authors identify three key contributions from citizens in this brand development process: 'emotions, feelings and stylistic preferences' (Eshuis, Klijn & Braun, 2014: 156).Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė (2013) go further in their examination of place branding to provide a list of elements, in order of importance, that are regularly examined by place branders in questionnaires or through consultation with citizens.Indeed, this synthesis by Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė (2013) is particularly relevant to this research since it considers the work of both academics and practitioners in the field of place branding, ranking the findings based on analysis of both these groups.From their table 2, a list of themes can be proposed for application in a priori coding of travel articles on Nantes in this case study: 01-heritage 02-leadership 03-infrastructure 04-culture 05-people 06-society 07-government 08-events 09-history 10-perceived-value 11-social-conditions 12-public-services 13-stories 14-business 15-environment (Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė, 2013: 152-153) They further argue that campaigns that do not include the interests of local people lead to a loss of authenticity and recognition in the resulting brand, when the brand is subsequently communicated (Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė, 2013).This communication of the place brand includes travel articles.The promotion of what is already there in a place, its geography and weather, is almost directly opposed to writing advertising copy, where the buyer's value system is the main consideration, since it is modifying the buyer's behaviours that is at stake in achieving a sale.For more on modifying tourist behaviour and how behaviour is linked to tourists' own cultures, please see (Li & Cai, 2012;Madrigal & Kahle, 1994;Madrigal, 1995;Mansfeld, 1992).Li & Cai (2012) examine Kahle's List of Values, LOV, scale to develop a model linking values to behaviour.Azevedo (2009) conducts place brand research using citizen involvement.Azevedo's questionnaire, administered to 107 subjects (Azevedo, 2009: 8) elicited the positive elements of the town and reports these in the language used by his subjects, for example, 'welcoming' (13.3%), 'beautiful' (11.1%).A relatively high 11.3% of the subjects mention the mayor as contributing positively to their feeling for the town, thus confirming points of leadership and government from the list of elements reproduced above (Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė, 2013).Very useful, too, to the travel writer and place brander alike, are the identifiable locations that locals associate with these positive feelings, eg 'excellent beaches', the 'wine cellars and the 'river Douro banks', since the local subjects are more likely to be drawing on their positive personal experiences rather than remembering advertising copy from promotional literature (Azevedo 2009).The place brander and travel writer could then go to investigate the physical locations in the town that have these dramatically positive associations for people.Azevedo (2009) does not ask his subjects for stories, even though he asks about heritage.Zakarevičius & Lionikaitė (2013) rate stories, in a combined grouping with heritage as highly important.Finding ways of eliciting stories from locals linked to their positive locations, would, therefore, be a worthwhile element to investigate.The primary skill of place branders lies is their ability to design discovery instruments which are powerful and yet sensitive enough to record the positive components of identity formation of people who have found places of value and culture in the urban space under study.An intellectual movement did exist for this discovery work, the Situationists in the 1950s, and this study returns to look at this movement in a later section finding parallels in placemaking studies.

Existing Development and City Branding Projects for Nantes
Under the direction of Jean Blaise, a public company was formed in 2011 to manage a tourism and cultural promotion project called Le Voyage à Nantes with an annual budget of 27 000 000 euros and 260 full-time equivalent employees (Nantes.Tourisme, 2015).Le Voyage à Nantes is une société publique locale (an SPL), a legal entity designed to make the management of public funds more competitive.Under an SPL, the managers and employees, at least in Le Voyage à Nantes, consider themselves free to commission artists and to act as sponsors, rather like Renaissance patrons of the arts.This assumed role is interesting for the professional travel writer and this project since it offers a way of financing guided walks or commissioning the research, writing, Figure 3 above is also a reminder that French DMOs compete with other towns across France for their share of inbound British visitors; this demonstrates the importance attached to city branding and the measurement of its effectiveness.Thus, analytical techniques such as the one explained in this paper, will be valuable tools for the DMO to gauge the effect of their branding and identify gaps in the place brand image.
This paper, and this practice of travel and place writing, attempts to situate travel writing in a professional context, aligned with the intellectual concerns of tourism studies and the creation of tourism knowledge.In a commercial environment, travel journalism may be used to increase revenue by promoting the tourism product available for those on a city break but for the visitors themselves, cultural knowledge gained from reading and exploring heritage is linked to personal emancipation.Cultural tourists seek out experiences that will free them to enjoy a more fulfilled life.Personal value for holidaymakers may derive from accomplishments and positive identity growth; these are related to uncovering the hidden experiences in a modern city (Koeck & Warnaby, 2015).Psychoanalytical practices also contribute to the conceptual framework for this research; Bernstein explains that if people recognise their own self in a proffered narrative they can continue their interrupted self-formative process and gain emancipation (Bernstein, 1995: 64).Bernstein draws heavily on Habermas for this position and thus this research is situated in the paradigm of critical theory, which includes close-reading, hermeneutics and interpretive analysis.

Data Integrity Processes for the Travel Articles
The method of data collection for this new study can be easily repeated by DMOs and travel writers.

Methods for Coding the Travel Articles for Analysis
The framework method has been identified as a valid research method for discovering tourism knowledge (Brunt, 1997), while Gale et al. (2013) provide a guide to using the framework method for thematic content analysis of qualitative data.Their process takes five steps from coding through charting onto a matrix then uses interpretation through memo-writing.These steps employ inductive reasoning, where the data suggest strong evidence.The final step uses abductive reasoning to move from observation to plausible new theory from the findings.Gale et al. (2013) use open-coding since they have no specific pre-formed hypothesis about what they will find.However, while this research does use open coding (Charmaz, 2006) to some extent it concentrates primarily on finding matches to the list from place branding practice to answer the question: Do these easily-found travel articles align with place branding practice?And, where are the gaps?That is, which place branding elements are poorly represented in the publicly accessible travel articles on Nantes?
The QSR software package NVivo v.11 is used to process the travel articles and to produce frameworks for analysis and graphical results to guide the interpretation of the findings.This study has coded food in 04-culture and terroir in 15environment.

How do the Travel Articles match the 15 Place Branding Elements?
The overview provided by an NVivo word-cloud of the collected travel articles shows that the subject matter is ontopic and that a positive image is created for UK readers with the highlighted words: City, Nantes, Bristol, Great Place: An NVivo query, using its matrix coding option, reveals the relationship between the place branding elements and the themes covered in the travel articles from online newspapers.The matrix graph shows that one travel article addresses 5 of the 15 elements from place branding a very high correlation.
The NVivo graph does reveal some consensus by the travel writers; 04-culture and 09-history are elements that are each covered in 7 out of the 12 articles found on Nantes.Whatever conditions affect the writers' choices in what to include in their writing a visible pattern does emerge.Close-reading of the references to 04-culture shows lists of where to eat, which are very similar to those found in guide-books.Perhaps the time the writers can spend in the field and their perceived expectations of their audience, both their editors and their readers, determine what they include from the tourism product.No attempt is evident to provide a story for readers to incorporate into their own narrative in any of the pieces, although a suggestion of a narrative is made by Coates when he introduces the character of his 21-year-old son into the article using dialogue (Coates, 2014) and a certain resolution occurs to the story in the carousel scene (Coates, 2014).It must be concluded though that online travel articles published by high profile media companies do not to provide opportunities for readers to identify with Nantes, nor to take ownership of the city through narrative or stories.
However, key to this study is that three branding elements are not covered by any of the articles, these are 06-society, 11social-conditions and 13-stories.A documented example exists of how these three missing elements can be researched and found; the academic sociologist, Delcroix uses reflexive forms of action research and recounts the story of one of her projects in Nantes (Delcroix & Inowlocki, 2008); essentially it is a success story where isolated fathers in the community are empowered to engage with teenage groups to jointly develop social capital to improve the social conditions of the city.Through life-story narrative sessions the fathers create family memory and from this gain power through increasing the networked social capital of the urban space (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).The methodology of narrating life-stories using practitioner-led reflexive sessions is explained more thoroughly by Chaxel, Fiorelli & Moity-Maïzi (2014); their study shows how the case participants can reveal resources from earlier times in their lives that can be used as part of emancipatory practices in the future (Chaxel et al, 2014).Delcroix and these other academic researchers do spend far longer in the field than travel journalists can spend when on assignment for online media publishers, though.

How can these findings inform the process of commissioning travel writers?
Commissioned travel writers and the field researchers in place branding lack direction to the urban places in which stories are being made, for example those complex ones from social conditions discussed above (Delcroix & Inowlocki, 2008).The tourists' places, too, elicited from the hidden delights of a modern city (Koeck & Warnaby, 2015) could be added to the places for commissioned writers.It opens the question of how the places are distributed across the space of the city under study, Nantes.Michel, for example, explores the creative quartier of Nantes, Les Olivettes in his doctoral research using semi-structured interviews, and from that delineates a plateau of interest in the city by mapping the networks of relationships between creative companies (Michel, 2014), see particularly his map, figure 1 (Michel, 2014: 31).Saunders & Moles (2016) present an operationalised process for unearthing stories of place in their data collection of audio recordings by young men in a district of Cardiff.These long-term academic research approaches could be developed into a more compact process for engaging with locals focussed on specific locations in the city.In this way, stories of value to others who want to enjoy the places could be mobilised as part of a more accessible network of social capital.Research to do this is continuing.

Additional Findings from Open Coding the Travel Articles
French Meal-taking Culture Unpacked The collection of travel articles, analysed using the framework method, reveals the cultural phenomenon of the set lunchtime meal that persists in France; indeed, it is a practice that is subtly hidden in the wording of the inscription of the gastronomic meal of the French on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO, 2010).For the French reader, no explanation is necessary to describe a restaurant where the lunch served is the same for every customer, no choice, no menu of options is offered, nor does there appear to be a word in French for this custom.In English, the phrase set-meal or set-lunch almost describes this deeply embedded cultural practice, but if translated back into French the phrase takes on another meaning, that of the menu prix fixe, where the cooking is fixed to 2 or 3 main dishes but still offers the client a choice.Petit, in her French detective novel set in contemporary Nantes, (Petit, 2010) assumes this custom requires no explanation for her French readers and relies on it to provide a realistic meeting point for four of her characters, two of which are the key protagonists, whose interaction can only be convincing because of this French custom.For example, one of the characters takes lunch at Le Péché mignon restaurant, The Sweetest Sin, at the same table, at noon every day (Petit, 2010: 45) and will eat whatever is served, along with all the other customers.The example lunch given in the novel is rabbit in cider (Petit, 2010: 18); considered as a tourism product this presents problems to visitors who are vegetarian or do not consume alcohol.One of the travel articles analysed in this study highlights how the real restaurant Lulu Rouget, on rue du Cheval Blanc, presents what could be a problem for visitors as a surprise.The restaurant re-packages or markets, in the strictly technical sense of the word, this French cultural practice by saying that the dishes are a secret.

Recommendations to Place Branders, Commissioning Editors and Travel Writers
The DMO for Nantes could continue this ongoing analysis of the travel articles that are published online for UK readers using this research as a model.This process would identify which branding elements are ignored in the press.By commissioning writers and broadcasters, the DMO could specify which elements to include to engage the audience with the city.Identifying a leading writer in this field requires a knowledge of the UK media scene, for example, the art historian, Sandrine Voillet, who spent her childhood Nantes, has built a reputation in Britain for cultural productions on French urban space, thanks to her writing (Voillet, 2007) and her BBC2 series on Paris, with clips reused by the UK's Open University (BBC2, 2006).The starting points for stories need to be unearthed, too, so that they can be dramatized and set in the places as part of place-making.Stories are found in the cultural history of the town, which coincides with branding element 6-society, and these are present in the architecture and contemporary novels set in the town.However, by using stories from the lives and works of key creative figures as leaders, for example, the poet André Breton who worked in Nantes, which would coincide with element 13-stories, and as discussed earlier the work on Cardiff which engaged locals in audio guides (Saunders & Moles, 2016), under the heading 11-social conditions, a knowledge creation practice could be established both for the DMO and travel or place writer and for future academic research.
(i) Finding Stories -Creatives as Leaders: Stories from Locals' Tacit Knowledge of Social Conditions (Elements 11 &13) In this operation local respondents are recruited to walk from an older established visitor site, to one from the life and work of a creative leader associated with Nantes, in this case André Breton.His lines written about his love for a park in the north of the city (Breton, 1928) provide a destination for a dérive walk by the respondents (Vachon, 2003).They are asked to collect small artefacts and to make audio recordings (Saunders & Moles, 2016).Older respondents will be engaged in this further research, since it is tacit knowledge of the space and the social meaningfulness of the walked routes that is of value to the process of eliciting the knowledge (Mansfield, 2015).An alternative destination is a site of memory in the city that is going to undergo a change, especially where local inhabitants can be found who know the ruined area well.An excellent example in Nantes is the square known as La place de la Petite-Hollande, for which currently, 2017, an urban redevelopment competition is being run by Nantes Metropole.Academic literature on this type of restructuring is also available (Agueda, 2014;Oliveira, 2015).Social capital is not an individual possession, but rather it is a function of the time spent communicating in a social network when knowledge transfer has become balanced through the internal governance of that network (Scott, Baggio & Cooper, 2008).A balanced network of actors, including the DMO, the tourists themselves and the competing suppliers and tourism companies who have a stake in the development of a value in a city space will have high social capital if they have systems in place for the distribution of knowledge about the site.To this network must be added the local inhabitants, especially ones who already have social capital through networks in which they regularly create and share knowledge.A skilled researcher may be granted entry to these two types of network.In the latter network, to participate in knowledge creation by guiding sessions of selfhermeneutics (Foucault, 2014) to elicit tacit knowledge from residents.

CONCLUSION
Empirical, yet desk-based research requiring only a low budget and reasonably small investments of time can reveal which elements of a DMO's brand are, and are not communicated in the online press for a specific country and language group, who may be potential visitors to a city.In this study on Nantes, the three place-branding elements of: 06-society, 11-social-conditions and 13-stories were not covered by the UK national press online between 2001 and 2016.
More detailed work in archive, academic or historical research is needed, however, to find the missing stories to fill these branding gaps.Recommendations for that work are presented in the paper; these are based on productive, relevant research methods discovered in the academic literature.Further work on this ongoing post-doctoral research project will report on the efficacy of the two processes proposed above.The second of these requires mobilisation of respondents during fieldwork in the city and so be more costly and time-consuming; funding for this has been secured for fieldwork in archaeological topophonics in April 2017.Open-coding, which is a process from grounded theory, can direct researchers in their further reading and so help them develop a more nuanced understanding of the culture of a place.The example pursued in this case study is the mealtaking culture of this French city.The discovery was further enriched by the reading of contemporary literary fiction.However, access to this literature would not be possible for English-speaking visitors.The process can be adopted by travel writers to enrich their writing on place if they can read the language used in the destination.

Limitations section
Researchers or DMOs using the methods from this research on a different city may find the published travel articles limited or difficult to separate from football news, which uses the same city name in search engine results.A further limitation may arise from the sources chosen as representative of how searches are made by potential city break tourists.With the rise of social media, researchers may need to consider that buyers of travel and tourism products could be using TripAdvisor and Google Maps as their primary entry point for finding travel destination ideas and motivation.
packaging and distribution of pieces of travel literature or even of workshops or residencies around place writing in Nantes.To give context to the tourism activity of UK holidaymakers in Nantes, data from INSEE's Pack Hôtels Product (INSEE, 2016) were used, first to show the number of nights stayed in the whole of France by tourists whose country of residence was the UK: Examining the above figure in detail, it can be seen that the fall in numbers of UK residents using hotels in France between 2008 and 2011 is probably due to the world economic depression after the banking failures, which became known during the autumn of 2008.From its low point of 10,468,822 nights stayed in hotels in 2011, as the bar graph above shows, some recovery can be seen up to the most recent figures available (INSEE, 2016).Statistics for hotel night-stays for Nantes were available from the DMO, Le Voyage à Nantes (LVAN, 2016), and although not covering the same complete period, do show the interest that UK tourists have for Nantes, please see the bar graph in Figure 2 below: The urban area covered by the bar graph in Figure 2 above is the CU, the Communauté urbaine, which comprises Nantes plus the 23 suburban spaces around the city.The increase in 2013 may be attributed to the award of European Green City 2013 to Nantes and the additional traffic that would be created, particularly from Bristol.Bristol was bidding for the next Green City award and planning a new air route from Bristol to Nantes.If those two graphs are now combined, please see Figure 3 below, to see if Nantes' share of UK tourists to France changed, then that Green City year of 2013 does again show as an increase in Nantes' share of UK visitors.At the time of writing, no more recent figures had been released for the years 2014-2016.