Graz Kulturhauptstadt Europas 2003: textuelle und sprachliche Strategien bei der Repositionierung der Imagefaktoren

The following work investigates how the marketing strategy created by Graz – cultural capital of Europe 2003 has been realized on the linguistic-textual level. Graz caught the opportunity offered by its nomination and the correlated great event of modifying deeply its traditional image and positioning the new brand worldwide. Graz needed a unique profile; it had to change former image factors like “dreamy – quiet”, “off the road”, “unknown – in the shadow of other Austrian cities” into completely new attributes: self-confident, quick, creative, surprising, intelligent, exacting, ironical. The target groups should identify these qualities not only with Graz as a cultural centre but also with its political and economical spheres. Examining a chosen corpus the paper analyses which kind of texts should transfer the new image, which textual and linguistic strategies were applied, which differences they present in comparison with former publications.