SIBIU BETWEEN EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND BREXIT: CITY BRAND PERSPECTIVE ON CITIZENS

Abstract

City branding represents a particular category of coomercial branding, aiming at attracting resources to the citie in a way that ensures the the wellbeing of the citizen. Sibiu has embraced the EU cultural challenge and transformed European Capital of Culture (ECoC) into a success city brand by culture strategy, certainly improving the liveability of the city. Ten years later, Sibiu, as a small-medium sized cultural city with strongly proved European valences might be facing a similar challang. Its reaction is totally different. This paper sheds the lighs of the city on the citizens, as stakeholders, publics or cunsumer of the city, revealing a possible explanation of this different behaviour of Sibiu. The research is based on in-depth interviews conducted in the summer of 2016, aiming at identifying the atitudes, opinions and reactions to BREXIT. The main conclusion is that the interviewed persons favourably reacted to the city development by culture as an expression of history, identity, personal achievement, while politics is the attribute of just some part of the city. The interviewed persons oscilated very much between the European feeling and the traditional paradigm of less important country in the EU or in the geopolitical context.