Smart city branding in Latin America: between strategic narratives and visitor perceptions

Purpose This study aims to examine how smart city attributes are perceived by visitors and represented in the official digital communication of ten Latin American cities. It investigates how city branding, smart city strategies and smart tourism intersect through digital media. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a layered mixed-methods design, this research combines a 2022 survey on visitor perceptions with a qualitative analysis of digital communication from official tourism accounts, conducted in two phases (2022–2025). Findings Results reveal partial misalignments between visitor perceptions of “smartness” and institutional branding. While official narratives emphasize cultural and environmental imagery, they often underrepresent governance, innovation and mobility. Yet visitors interpret smartness through emotional and symbolic cues, while cities preserve coherence via visual storytelling that sustains recognizable meaning across platforms. Research limitations/implications The focus on ten cities and reliance on retrospective visitor perceptions may limit generalizability and introduce recall bias. Future studies could incorporate other stakeholder perspectives and longitudinal analyses to explore how smart city branding evolves. Practical implications Findings offer guidance for city managers and policymakers to integrate smart city principles into branding strategies. Promoting coherence between institutional narratives and lived experience can enhance legitimacy and engagement. Originality/value The theoretical contribution of this study lies in integrating city branding, smart cities and smart tourism into a unified framework. By introducing a continuum of alignment between visitor perceptions and institutional representations, it establishes coherence as a primary analytical lens. Furthermore, it reframes “smartness” as a socio-symbolic and experiential construct, shifting the paradigm beyond purely technological definitions through an analysis of LATAM cities.