A Study on Place Brand of Coimbatore among the Entrepreneurs in Small and Medium Scale Industries Using Structural Equation Modeling

Place branding is one of the classical products brands that have emerged from place marketing strategies. Place branding includes both place marketing and place promotion. It is said to be a new umbrella term encompassing nation branding, region branding and city branding. Place branding is the process of image communication to a target market. It is invariably related to the notion that places compete with other places for people, resources, and business. Place branding can be defined as the process employed by public administrations to intend to create place brands. ―A place brand is a network of associations in the place consumers‘ mind based on the visual, verbal, and behavioral expression of a place and its‘ stakeholders. These associations differ in their influence within the network and in importance for the place consumers‘ attitude and behavior‖ (Zenker & Braun, 2012, p. 275). It therefore aims to affect the perceptions of a place and position it favorably in the minds of the target groups. Place branding thus suggests that places, cities, regions or countries could be considered as brands, as long as perceived so. In this regard, many public administrations are implementing place branding strategies. The main purpose of this paper is to study on place branding of Coimbatore based on which success factors made the business people to attract to the place Coimbatore for their investment. The First objective of this study is based on various demographic profiles of the investors and the second objective of the study is to know which success factors attracted for the business people to invest on place brand Coimbatore.