Identifying and Prioritizing Factors Affecting the Brand of Sahand City with an Interpretive Structural Modeling Approach

Despite the fact that the new city of Sahand has high a potential for an all-around presence in the field of urban branding and creating a unique brand to benefit from the advantages of urban branding, it has not yet found its proper place in this field. The current research aims to identify and prioritize factors affecting the city brand of Sahand. This study is practical in terms of targeting and descriptive-analytical in terms of methodology. In the process of data preparation and production, first, the explanatory components of the city brand were identified using the opinions of 30 professors and experts from the relevant organizations through the Delphi method. To analyze the information of 18 factors as strong influencing factors on the brand of Sahand city, ISM interpretive-structural modeling and Mic Mac software were used. The results of the research showed that mass media and physical and environmental indicators are among the most influential components of the urban brand and indicators of favorable reputation, sense of pride in the city, sense of belonging, attractiveness of the city, tourism facilities, migration, and participation are among the most susceptible factors. Moreover, the results obtained from Mic Mac show that the influential indicators are part of the key variables, which have high influence power, low dependence, and the greatest impact on the development of a city brand in Sahand city, and other indicators are part of the linked variables that have high influence and dependence. Therefore, taking the necessary measures requires the serious attention of urban and regional managers and planners.