Positioning of a University City: The Correlation of the Semantic and Visual Aspects of the Brand

The article discusses the marketing positioning strategy used to ensure competitiveness in relation to the city brand. Since university cities inherently form a ready-made market segment, the need to detach from competitors is emphasized, and therefore the emphasis is on identity as a brand attribute. Through political construction (the leadership role of the authorities in creating and using a positioning strategy), the brand of the city is given a supervalue, which is projected into the reality of perception. The idea of the subjective nature of the foundations of branding is substantiated, although some researchers of the urban brand insist on its objective predestination and a priori nature. The subjectivity of the nature of a brand means its artificially constructed meaning and a deliberate interpretation of its positioned meaning The positioning of the city's brand occurs in a new communicative situation when the authorities must rely on social communication with the brand, discuss its distinctive features and value. It is this format of communication that today allows identifying the brand of the city, comparing "positions", and making a choice. Therefore, in order to maintain the city's brand identity, it is better to focus on brand management rather than on rebranding. Brand management allows managing the brand value, which is more expedient to create on the basis of one archetype. For a university city brand, this is the Wiseman. As a concrete example of a university city, the Tomsk case is used; in particular, the modeling of the image of the city by positioning its brand is investigated. In terms of revealing the relationship of various aspects in brand positioning, it is argued that the construction of a city brand through its modeling is associated primarily with the process of giving meaning to the city-sign. And the main prerequisite for the semioticization of the city-sign is the city's semiosphere, its semiotic space. In marketing terms, the city's semiosphere reaches the cultural stage of self-description, which is manifested in the institutionalization of branding. In this case, the brand becomes an urban "norm", and a typical city dweller communicatively supports it, expressing the brand's identity. In general, the priority of the semantic value of the brand is substantiated as a constructed feature that is the dominant characteristic of the city. The important visual aspect of the city brand is seen as a common case of unfinished semiotics when some brand practices of cities show the problem of decoding visual symbols thus interfering with the understanding of significant meaning. As a general conclusion, it is emphasized that, in the context of global communication, a city nominating itself a "university" one should give a visual identity to its brand and correlate it with the dominant semantic "position" of the brand this city forms.