Purpose This paper aims to present concepts and tools for developing place branding that protects places from overbranding, redundant promotion and excessive tourism. Design/methodology/approach The concept of a product-based place brand that reflects local ways of life and local identities was introduced. A combination of projective, typological and narrative methods was applied. Three focus groups composed of future place managers were held in three countries (N = 27) to develop place brand vocabularies and typologies of verbal characteristics of abstract places as products for internal users (residents). Findings In most cases, the place brand vocabularies were consistent and compatible within each abstract type and were unique (mutually exclusive) between the types. The vocabularies contained both detailed and more generalized elements. For each place, short formulations of the general concept were found. Each brand vocabulary reflected the institutional, socio-psychological, cultural, historical and geographic differences of the countries involved in the research. Originality/value A conceptual and methodological framework for creating place brand vocabularies is offered, and it describes the close relationship between multiple internal brand attributes and their concise expressions appropriate for communication and high differentiation among brand attributes that facilitate the recognition of branded places by target and non-target audiences. The framework is applicable for designing verbal attributes of place brands for specific places to avoid overbranding effects.

Numerous research on Speech Act Theory considers the pragmatic functions of various types of speech acts, their illocutionary forces and implementation in language, focusing either on their locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary constituents or on their taxonomies, whereas the analysis of semantic and syntactic properties of performative formula remains scarce. The present paper reports on the study of temporal perspective of commissive speech acts in the English language. Specifically, it examines temporal-aspectual forms in propositions of performative verbs of promise, swear and bet. The methodology to investigate temporal-aspectual features of verbs in proposition includes literature review and a continuous sampling method with the help of which the author analysed approximately 1,800 performative utterances containing commissive performative verbs. The results of research demonstrate that the set of temporal-aspectual forms as well as their frequency differ from one commissive under the study to another, while the syntactic structures of propositions is homogeneous. The study also established the correlation between the illocutionary force of commissive performative verbs and temporal-aspectual forms of verbs in proposition. The results of the study might have practical implications in teaching English as a foreign language in terms of grammar and sociocultural aspects.

 The paper shows relationships between the characteristics of residents and the places, where they live. A combination of three criteria of place attractiveness (retention and attraction, conditions for natural growth, and settling) was chosen to classify places, and profiles of their beneficiaries on the theoretical level. The results of the empirical study partially con­firm the developed theoretical typologies. Two methods to segment place market are equal only if expectations of population are constant. Study results allow place marketers to identify emerging shifts in the structure of beneficiaries of specific places and predict their further evolution.

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