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"Bärnstenskusten" : Hur Kaliningrad marknadsförs med anledning av fotbolls-VM i Ryssland 2018 och det skiftande säkerhetspolitiska läget

Author

  • Johanna Svenson

Summary, in English

This thesis will investigate how both the region but primarily the city of Kaliningrad – today belonging to the Russian federation, historically belonging to East Prussia and Germany – are branded and marketed by four different fields or categories of agents. This is done with the 2018 summer World Cup Football Games in mind, which will take place in Russia. First and foremost is to note that it mainly is the city of Kaliningrad that is subject to this investigation rather than the region with the same name. One of the thesis’ goals is to broaden the understanding of how cities are branded with the help of different strategies, concepts, discourses and methods that these agents provide. This will take place in the context of external marketing with the tourism industry as target group. In this particular case of Kaliningrad, special circumstances apply. These circumstances are oriented around foreign policy and security policy, for reasons that will be presented further into the thesis. One of the purposes of the investigation is to see if there are visible traces of these problematic circumstances in the marketing provided by the agents. The theoretical perspective which is applied to the investigation is the concept of city branding from the work of Keith Dinnie: ”City branding – theory and cases”. This is used to illustrate various otherwise hidden significations of the discourses and marketing strategies which the investigation will find. The main issue or question of the thesis is as follows: How do different agents provide people with information that will make them want to visit a place that in reality might pose a threat? How do these agents ”sell” the region as worthy of a visit, when foreign policy say something completely different? The investigation demonstrates that some discourses are more common than others in the context of marketing, and that there often are common denominators between different agents which provide the information. It also proves that the different agents niche themselves with different specific marketing strategies and discourses that only they use in special circumstances. The investigation also demonstrates that none of the agents providing information about Kaliningrad mentioned anything about the foreign- or security oriented political/policy situations – not even in the context of a warning or such – but rather has as their main goal to increase the interest of tourism in the area.

Department/s

Publishing year

2018

Language

Swedish

Document type

Student publication for Bachelor's degree

Topic

  • Social Sciences
  • Cultural Sciences

Keywords

  • Kaliningrad
  • branding
  • discourse analysis
  • tourism
  • international relations
  • europastudier
  • European Studies
  • Football
  • fotball

Supervisor

  • Tomas Sniegon