Image source: Photo_501728795
Author: Mu Ling, Deputy Director and Researcher of the National Film Think Tank of Beijing Film Academy, Director of the New Media Research Office of the National Image Communication Research Center of Tsinghua University
In 2021, in China's urban map, Luoyang, the ancient capital of the Thirteen Dynasties, moved from the depths of history to the forefront of the times.
Luoyang stands out, and Henan Satellite TV's series of traditional cultural programs are indispensable. The wonderful tour from the Spring Festival Gala to the Dragon Boat Festival to the Mid-Autumn Festival, as well as the phenomenon-level programs of traditional festivals such as Qingming, Qixi and Chongyang, have made Luoyang, a historical and cultural ancient city, shine brightly.
Luoyang thus became a phenomenon. It is worth asking: what is the brand code behind it?
Start with the needs of your audience
In the process of urban branding and communication, what is the most essential or core factor? The answer is the audience.
Communication scholar Laswell proposed a 5W communication model, that is, who ( Say What ) - in which channel - audience (To whom) - with What Effect. In the entire communication chain, the audience occupies the core position, which is the starting point and destination of brand construction and communication. It is related to the transmission of the content of communication, the choice of channels, and the control and evaluation of the effect of communication.
Only when the city meets a certain need of the audience, with a unique identification sign and spiritual symbol, and forms a certain impression and recognition in the audience's mind, can it build its brand.
Therefore, when we think about Henan Satellite TV's use of cultural phenomena to shape the Luoyang city brand, whether it is talking about the integration of ancient and modern in the form of high-tech empowerment, bringing visual impact and shock to the audience, or attributing the diffusion of short videos to the communication channels and increasing the coverage of the audience, especially the young audience, in fact, the summary and summary of these laws have not left the audience perspective.
In recent years, there are not a few cities that have gone out of the circle with culture, and in the process of urban brand building and dissemination, it is indispensable to follow the vine and peel off the cocoon from the perspective of the audience.
The awakening of a "sense of ceremony"
Luoyang's urban brand building provides new ideas for many cities with main cultural brands, and its core coding mechanism lies in the superposition of traditional festivals + traditional culture. It is the "sense of ritual" that inherits and innovates the cultural traditions of festivals from generation to generation, awakening, echoing and maintaining the audience's deep cultural psychological needs.
Wrapped in irreplaceable spiritual needs, traditional festivals have been passed down in the precipitation of time and life, evolving into an important part of the folk culture of the Chinese nation, and also becoming an important carrier of cultural pursuit and psychological comfort of the Chinese people.
Image source: Photo_501725957
At present, the "taste" of many traditional festivals in China is gradually fading and weakening, and this "taste", that is, the "ritual" and "ritual" created by various folk activities, are precisely to meet the cultural needs surging in the blood of the audience.
The sense of cultural ritual is also a catalyst to bring the audience from a bystander into the situation, which brings the audience a holiday experience beyond the conventional, and the festival activities need to fully display the characteristics of the ceremony and do enough of the ceremonial links. For example, our Spring Festival New Year's Festival, Dragon Boat Race, Mid-Autumn Festival, Moon Festival and Lanterns.
Rituals can essentially be seen as a unique encoding of a culture's symbol to which it belongs, in which it manifests the culture to the audience and continues to produce the audience's sense of belonging or identity. The coding behavior of rituals, with the development of the times, can be used and presented in different material carriers and technical media.
The opening ceremony of the Edinburgh International Festival is fixed in the Old Castle, and there is a strict ceremonial arrangement: at night, the performance team playing the medieval Scottish Knight Horse Team slowly walks out of the castle and follows the mountain road into the downtown streets of the Old Town. Every year, tens of thousands of spectators compete to witness this solemn moment full of ritual.
When this sense of cultural ritual is constantly simplified or even absent in reality, the audience's subconscious desire for spiritual and psychological needs such as belonging and identification will not disappear, and it will continue to exist. At this time, the creation of an alternative cultural ritual, especially for today's youth groups, is necessary.
The series of video programs represented by Henan Satellite TV have constructed a new "ritual" of the "virtual" world, allowing the audience to re-find the cultural roots and spiritual origins in the long-deserted memory. Not only that, with the help of ubiquitous moving images, this new "ritual" has also been greatly expanded in time and space, shaping a city and its culture as a symbol of "Chinese tradition" to meet the spiritual needs of more Chinese people, while also branding and spreading the city under the blessing of emerging media technologies.
In fact, as early as the advent of the television era, observing the New Year and watching the Spring Festival Gala as a new ritual was added to the Spring Festival cultural customs, and once became the "new folk custom" of the Chinese people. In the long river of time, the old cultural traditions and rituals continue or disappear, new cultural rituals are added and become traditions, and the cultural rituals of festivals are constantly expanding.
In the process of inheritance and change, what has evolved drastically is the way cultural rituals are encoded, and what remains unchanged is the core of communication: the spiritual belonging and identity needs of the audience. This is an important path that urban brand communication needs to consider when trying to take the "culture" route.
Continuous "supply"
The city brand built with the help of the communication effect of traditional festival culture depends on the audience's high recognition and emotional connection with cultural traditions. The level of audience engagement and the ability to get a rich experience in the cultural tradition are the key to whether the audience can produce stickiness with the festival culture and the city brand.
Image source: Photo Network_501353189
Therefore, in the operation process of shaping the city brand with the help of festival traditions, it is necessary to encode the audience-oriented, that is, to plan and formulate relevant cultural content, so as to forge and strengthen the city's cultural brand.
It is worth noting that the shaping and dissemination of urban brands is a continuous system engineering, that is to say, cities need to continuously provide "supplies" to the audience to meet the audience's cultural identity and experience. If there is a lack of communication activities that closely follow the positioning of the city, then the marginal effect of the brand will diminish, and even a negative impression will appear.
At the same time, an unavoidable problem is that the audience's cultural experience and aesthetics have a tired period, just as any program on the market has a life cycle, if the city in the process of brand building and communication, the cultural form on which it relies can not continue to attract the attention of the audience, it will lack the motivation to shape the city brand.
Taking Henan Satellite TV as an example, although the broadcast of traditional cultural programs in each festival is spreading luoyang to varying degrees, it is still a great challenge to achieve freshness all the time.
Therefore, cities need to explore various forms to strengthen the dissemination of cultural brands, and the synthesis of single or multiple forms such as images, music, and design constitute a "matrix" to enhance the audience's sense of participation and experience, so that the audience can continuously deepen their sense of identity and experience of urban culture, and then strengthen brand positioning.
For example, in the process of global communication of Sanxingdui, it has integrated various forms such as movies, musicals, shows, and games, strengthening the brand communication of Sanxingdui, and also promoting the city brand of Guanghan to the world.
Experience it in reality
The image shaping and dissemination of cities in the virtual world of visual media provide a good opportunity for urban branding. But for the audience, "a hundred smells are better than a see", but more importantly, "a hundred views are not as good as a test".
Image source: Photo_501728808
The dissemination of the city to the audience is not to force the symbolic city image to the audience, but to share the feelings and opinions of various social subjects on the city, especially the audience's real experience of urban culture in reality.
When cities sow the seeds of their dreams in the minds of their audiences, most audiences tend to choose to go "far away" to get a glimpse of what is going on. Then, for the city, another important question is put on the agenda: has the city done a good job in the strength construction of soft and hard aspects, and shaped the "hard" objective impression (urban architecture, urban ecology, etc.) and the "soft" subjective impression (history, culture, customs and customs, etc.)?
After all, there is a difference between the transmission of real experience and the audiovisual communication of the virtual world.
Especially in cities positioned in the cultural category, when separated from the scientific and technological empowerment of sound and optoelectronics, how to transform the traditional cultural resources in reality to the cultural industry, how to carry out story-based expression, and how to trigger a new round of attention from the audience, are all urgent problems to be solved in the current cultural positioning of the city.
In short, how far can the branding of cities based on traditional culture go in the ever-changing era? "Non-new can not be advanced, non-old can not be kept", in fact, whether it is traditional festivals or emerging festivals, what changes in the new era is the form, and what remains unchanged is cultural pursuit and emotional comfort.
Urban brand building should grasp the core of the festival tradition to awaken the public's emotions, excavate the carrier of the times that carries cultural traditions and festival connotations, inherit and develop the historical roots of cultural festivals, awaken the sense of cultural ritual, identity and mission in the depths of the heart, so that the festival becomes an enduring cultural tradition, and also a value guide that leads the city's fashion lifestyle.
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