Abstract
City branding has become a central tool in global competition, where cities promote themselves through persuasive slogans designed to attract visitors, investors, and residents. Despite their apparent simplicity, such slogans frequently rely on vague or underspecified language, a strategy that may increase their persuasive and manipulative potential by allowing individuals to project their own expectations and desires onto the message. This pioneering study investigates the impact of vagueness in city-branding discourse from the consumers’ perspective through two survey-based experiments.
In a first experiment, participants are presented with authentic vague slogans from cities included in the Global Power City Index (GPCI) – and when not included, we created a sound counterfactual test with the cities’ equivalent economic performance indicators. For each slogan, participants are asked first to report what they would expect to find in the city, and then to select expressions that they feel best describe the place. A second experiment assesses vague vs. precise slogans’ persuasive functioning by asking participants either to choose their preferred version or to rate their level of appreciation of each slogan. In both studies, the city names were randomized to isolate the pre-existing city-relative priming. This design assesses how participants interpret vague slogans and whether these interpretations align with attributes factually associated with the cities.
The overarching aim is twofold: first, to test whether vague slogans are indeed more persuasive than precise ones; second, to relate participants’ evaluations to objective measures of city performance, so as to evaluate the manipulativeness of such slogans. By juxtaposing subjective appreciation with empirical indicators, we highlight a possible mismatch between persuasive appeal and actual qualities. From an interdisciplinary perspective combining psycholinguistics and consumer protection, the study contributes to understanding vagueness as a manipulative strategy in promotional discourse, raising critical questions about transparency and fairness in city branding practices.
In a first experiment, participants are presented with authentic vague slogans from cities included in the Global Power City Index (GPCI) – and when not included, we created a sound counterfactual test with the cities’ equivalent economic performance indicators. For each slogan, participants are asked first to report what they would expect to find in the city, and then to select expressions that they feel best describe the place. A second experiment assesses vague vs. precise slogans’ persuasive functioning by asking participants either to choose their preferred version or to rate their level of appreciation of each slogan. In both studies, the city names were randomized to isolate the pre-existing city-relative priming. This design assesses how participants interpret vague slogans and whether these interpretations align with attributes factually associated with the cities.
The overarching aim is twofold: first, to test whether vague slogans are indeed more persuasive than precise ones; second, to relate participants’ evaluations to objective measures of city performance, so as to evaluate the manipulativeness of such slogans. By juxtaposing subjective appreciation with empirical indicators, we highlight a possible mismatch between persuasive appeal and actual qualities. From an interdisciplinary perspective combining psycholinguistics and consumer protection, the study contributes to understanding vagueness as a manipulative strategy in promotional discourse, raising critical questions about transparency and fairness in city branding practices.