Formation and Promotion of St. Petersburg's Music Brand

This work is dedicated to looking at St. Petersburg as a music city and a potential destination for music tourism. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the mechanism of influence that music sub-brands have on the master brand of places. According to the purpose, the following objectives were formulated: 1) to study the principles of sub-brands’ functioning within the concept of destination branding; 2) to systematize and classify music sub-brands of places; 3) to determine the criteria for creating music sub-brands of St. Petersburg; 4) to study how the sub-brands and their associations influence the perception of the master place brand. The object of the research are the music sub-brands of places, and the subject is the influence of music sub-brands on the perception of the master place brand. The proposed hypotheses are the following: 1) the most optimal criteria for forming music sub-brands are the characteristics related to both music and history; 2) events serve as a basis for music sub-brands given the specifics of music consumption; 3) music sub-brands can influence the perception of the master place brand. For above-mentioned hypotheses to be tested, such methods as interviewing and content analysis of the information in the world wide web covering music in St. Petersburg were used. The research proved the first and the third hypotheses to be fully true and the second one to be partially true and concluded that: 1) the development of event-related music tourism based on single concerts is not efficient; 2) the experience of consumers’ interacting with music sub-brand is not homogeneous by its nature because of the existing practices; 3) music sub-brand can change the consumers’ perception of the master place brand.