Ampelmännchen: da icona culturale a guida interattiva di Berlino. Analisi dei canali social, studio di mercato e creazione dell'interfaccia grafica di AmpelmApp.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the birth and the evolution of a brand over time. In particular, the focus of this work is the Eastern ¿Ampelmännchen¿, Berlin's iconic brand that, what started as a traffic light, has become the city's trademark and through this project an interactive guide as well. This work is divided into five sections: the first part presents a literature review which comprises of theoretical studies conducted on the subject of Place Marketing. This section references fundamentals in the literature concerning main theories, the actors involved in the process, and the aims it pursues. In addition, it illustrates the resources and the strategies used by a location which rivals others. The second chapter is dedicated to the tourism of the future: more and more people implement the use of their Smartphone to move around a city or to discover a new place through new mobile instruments such as applications that contain GPS, QR Codes, or augmented reality. Moreover, Social Media, a remarkable instrument which allows people to easily connect with one another, has been analyzed in detail in this section. The third chapter presents the city's marketing and describes the city as a ¿product¿ to be sold and enjoyed and emphasizes the above-mentioned strategies that a city should adopt to become an ideal destination. In particular, place branding plays a fundamental role in marketing the city. The last two chapters of this thesis are experimental: the fourth chapter provides an introduction of the city of Berlin today and narrates the troubling story of its famous traffic man. Subsequently, it exposes and compares two other successful city brands: Be Berlin and Visit Berlin. Finally, it emphasizes the use of social media and websites to increase the reputation of the brand 'Ampelmann' using concrete examples. An essential section of this research work is the fifth chapter which is dedicated to a questionnaire created specifically to investigate the use of apps and their available functions. After examining the data obtained from the conducted survey and comparing two other apps typically used by tourists looking to visit the city of Berlin, the last chapter is based on the creation of a wireframe for an app called AmpelmApp, which was created through Adobe Illustrator. This thesis ends with a tour though the city of Berlin and in order to facilitate its usage for foreign users a description of two of Berlin's main attractions has been translated from Italian into German and English: Potsdamer Platz and the Palace of Berlin.