Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION
Downtowns provide shopping, dining, tourism, employment and recreational opportunities to residents and visitors (Farst, 2003). Downtowns in small communities have been home to small, independent, family-operated and community-based businesses, which tend to return a large sum of their profits to communities (Moe and Wilkie, 1997; Mayer, 2000) However, the advancement of transportation and Internet technology permits people to travel farther or to stay at home for shopping and socializing, which, along with rapid suburbanization, has increased the decline in downtowns' viability across the United States (Robertson, 2001). Consequently, downtowns with limited products, services and activities to offer face business survival issues. Place branding is a concept that can help strengthen a downtown and its business offerings.
The National Trust Main Street Center has helped more than 2000 communities across the United States revive their downtown business districts (Rane, 15 October 2010). One of the most successful cases of a small community's downtown revitalization is the city of Greenville, South Carolina (Whitworth and Neal, 2008). Greenville has turned its unappealing and uninviting downtown into a place where visitors and residents walk, shop, eat and have fun. The process of the transformation saw Greenville reposition its downtown by creating and offering a distinctive downtown atmosphere. The city administrators initiated and successfully executed anchor projects that differentiated the downtown of Greenville from other places. Greenville paid attention to details such as image, signage, events, safety, walkability and cleanliness that enhanced the downtown's sense of place and identity. Greenville also encouraged involvement of downtown stakeholders. These efforts added up to the successful revitalization of the downtown.
Previous studies of place branding have been either conceptual pieces (for example, Kavaratzis, 2004; Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2006) or tourism-based emphasizing visitors' perceptions of places (for example, Baloglu and McCleary, 1999). The assortment of small and independent businesses comprising downtowns and downtown businesses play major roles in downtown survival and revitalization (Korsching and Allen, 2004; Rightmyre et al , 2004), and downtown branding in the context of downtown revitalization is more complete when it includes business owners' perceptions of the branding process.
The current study proposes that downtowns and their businesses share a common economic destiny. That is, the sustainability of downtown businesses may depend on the downtowns' economic viability. A...