Chin. Geogra. Sci. 2019 Vol. 29 No. 1 pp. 86–99 Springer Science Press https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-019-1017-3 www.springerlink.com/content/1002-0063 Received date: 2018-05-10; accepted date: 2018-09-09 Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41320104001, 41871140), the Scientific Specific Fund Project of Collaboration and Innovation Center of Coordinating Urban and Rural in Shanxi Province (No. SXCXCXZD2017-002), the Special Fund Project of the Basic Research Service of Sun Yat-sen University (No. 17lgjc04) Corresponding author: XUE Desheng. E-mail: eesxds@mail.sysu.edu.cn © Science Press, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Na- ture 2019 Comprehensiveness and Locality: Website Marketing of World City Governments in the Era of Globalisation XUE Desheng 1 , LIU Huaikuan 1 , GUO Wenjiong 2 , LIU Ye 1 (1. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China; 2. Collaboration and Innovation Center of Coordinating Urban and Rural in Shanxi Province, Taiyuan Normal University, Jinzhong 030619, China) Abstract: In the era of the Internet and globalisation, more and more international academics focus their attention on how city govern- ments compete for talent, capital, and technology through website marketing to promote their economy and global status. However, 1) present research generally overlooks the importance of different types of elements in different marketing themes, 2) the combinations of marketing themes are still unknown, and 3) the presumption that the emphasised elements and specific combination of marketing themes on official websites differentiates cities requires more cases to be understood. In light of this background, this study collects homepage elements of 49 Alpha world cities’ official websites and quantitatively analyses the frequency of different types of elements, the market- ing content themes, and the dissimilarity of content of Chinese Alpha world cities. The results indicate that comprehensiveness and lo- cality appear in the process of city marketing throughout official city websites. Overall, we make the following conclusions. 1) The im- portance of different kinds of elements significantly differs between 49 Alpha world cities. 2) Based on various combinations of ele- ments, the marketing contents of Alpha world cities through official websites can be categorised into six themes of history and culture, government and information, construction and environment, government and living, construction and living, and general compound. 3) The marketing elements of five Chinese Alpha world cities, including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Guangzhou, are dif- ferent than the other 44 Alpha world cities, and Chinese cities prefer to advertise their history and culture but rarely market citizens’ activities. Moreover, Chinese cities’ marketing mostly targets natives while the other 44 Alpha cities target external groups, and the locality of world cities’ website marketing is reinforced especially on a native language edition website. This study ultimately finds that the Chinese edition websites of five Chinese cities place more focus on introducing local historical buildings, administrative services, and internal business information than the English edition websites do. Keywords: website marketing; globalisation; marketing content; comprehensiveness; locality Citation: XUE Desheng, LIU Huaikuan, GUO Wenjiong, LIU Ye, 2019. Comprehensiveness and Locality: Website Marketing of World City Governments in the Era of Globalisation. Chinese Geographical Science, 29(1): 86–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769- 019-1017-3 1 Introduction With the advent of globalisation, all cities will be caught up in the globalisation wave and must compete with others (Lefebvre, 2006). Consequently, if a city fails to develop attractive globalised elements, it will be sur- passed and eventually eliminated in this global competi- tive game (Liu et al., 2016; Ma et al., 2018). In this context, the concept of city marketing is put forward as a strategy for cities to ‘package, upgrade and create all kinds of resources that may attract investment, elites and tourists, and sell themselves through commercial media’