Abstract: Among the fierce regional competitions, to drive the firms to be involved in place branding has become a core strategy in regional development. Through the corporate dimension of cultural cognition in exploratory development of place branding and the mechanism of driving the enterprises to be involved in it, this paper empirically verifies the four dimensions of firm’s cultural cognition in the place branding context, namely collective beliefs, traditional norms, conventional routines and role orientations. Among them, the collective beliefs are generated by self-achievement, benefit acquisition and vision orientation; the traditional norms include sense of emotional belonging, traditional customs and unity consciousness; the conventional routines include mutual consensus, implicit norms and thinking orientation; and the role orientations include responsibility consciousness, voluntary consciousness as well as learning consciousness. These dimensions of firm’s cultural cognition have a significant positive impact on firm’s involvement and the promotion of place branding. These findings can bring managerial enlightenment to the development of strategies for driving firms to be involved in place branding from the perspective of cultural cognition.

Key words: place branding; cultural cognition; corporate involvement; driving mechanism