Chiara Mauri

The Three Hs: Hotels, Hospitality and Holidays: Strategies for Successful Place Brands in the Post-Pandemic "New Normal" examines how place branding is being fundamentally reshaped in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. As global tourism, hospitality, and holiday industries confront disrupted mobility, accelerated digitalisation, heightened sustainability pressures, and shifting consumer expectations, destinations are increasingly required to rebuild trust, resilience, and authenticity in an uncertain and volatile environment. Conceptualising hotels, hospitality services, and holiday destinations as the interconnected "Three Hs", this book positions place branding as an integrative, multi-stakeholder discipline that extends beyond traditional marketing communication. It explores how territorial identity, cultural narratives, digital technologies, and strategic governance interact to shape competitive and sustainable place brands in the post-pandemic "new normal". Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, the volume offers theoretically grounded and empirically informed insights into how destinations respond to crises, manage their reputations, and co-create value with residents, visitors, and institutional stakeholders. The book addresses critical contemporary themes, including digital transformation, artificial intelligence, smart destinations, sustainability integration, stakeholder engagement, authenticity, and crisis resilience. Structured across five interconnected sections, it moves from foundational perspectives on place identity and cultural meaning, through technological and digital innovations, to strategic marketing and management approaches, global comparative case studies, and future-oriented research agendas. Together, these perspectives highlight how innovation, technology, sustainability, and storytelling are redefining competitive advantage across diverse geographic and cultural contexts. Designed for both academic and professional audiences, this volume provides rigorous frameworks, global case evidence, and practical insights for researchers, graduate students, destination marketers, hospitality executives, policymakers, and urban planners. By combining conceptual depth with applied relevance, The Three Hs offers timely guidance for building resilient, ethical, and technologically enabled place brands in the evolving global tourism and hospitality landscape.

Many European cities have an industrial heritage rooted in their very origins, having been founded around one or more key industries. Manchester grew around cotton, the Ruhr region around coal and steel, and Turin around the automotive sector — all emblematic examples. When these industries enter a prolonged decline, the cities often lose part of their appeal and are forced to seek new paths for development. This chapter aims to explore the strategies needed to complement the original industrial identity of the place brand with associations linked to the tourist experience.

Brand honesty is increasingly mentioned as a desirable brand quality, yet it remains under-specified and is often addressed only indirectly through related constructs such as trust, transparency, sincerity, and equity/fairness. This study explores how consumers form honesty and dishonesty judgments about brands by combining a qualitative-based meanings of honesty, then used these insights to build a survey where participants named an honest or dishonest brand-point scale. The instrument included personality-like items grouped into four batteries: honesty-related traits, sincerity, equity/fair dealing, and ZMET-derived meanings. Using paired comparisons an honest brand are most strongly associated with equity/fair dealing cues, whereas perceptions of a dishonest brand are most strongly associated with lack of sincerity. The findings suggest that brand honesty is not simply the opposite of brand dishonesty and highlight the need for a multidimensional view of perceived brand honesty that integrates fair dealing and sincerity-based cues. Implications are discussed for both future measurement development and managerial strategies aimed at credibly signaling honesty.

Recent research has frequently remarked the increased crowding of store shelves driven by grocery manufacturers' product expansion strategies. However, many new products are imitations, copycats, and lookalikes of leading brands, adding further complexity to consumer choice decisions. The high degree of similarity between products not only contributes to consumers' information overload but also leads to increased brand confusion. This paper examines the academic debate on brand confusion through a systematic literature network analysis and introduces MIRROR, a thematic framework structured around six dominant perspectives that have shaped the understanding of this phenomenon: M for Mimicry, I for Imitation strategies, R for Reactions, R for Replication, O for Overall imitation effects, R for Retail price confusion. The acronym MIRROR also metaphorically reflects the competitive dynamics among products that adopt imitation strategies to capture consumer attention and drive purchase decisions.