Effects of the Perception of K-pop on Destination Image and Visit Intention to Korea : Focusing on Chinese Undergraduate Students

At this point of time that the global and popular recognition of K-pop has attracted foreign tourists, this study empirically analyzed the relationship between the perception of K-pop and destination image and visit intention to Korea. Since the most of K-pop audiences have accessed the Korean pop songs through multimedia using Social Network Service(SNS), this study investigated the perception of K-pop in terms of visuality and musicality. The result showed that both visuality and musicality of K-pop affected the destination images of Korea rather than visit intention to Korea. In other words, these results meant that musical perception of K-pop, as one genre of music in the world, created more influences on tourists over the visual perception of the songs. The global recognition of K-pop indicates that the Korean pop cultures would be able to continuously spread out around world, and we could actively and easily introduce the overall Korean cultures to the people who have been exposed to K-pop already. Therefore, we can persistently build better destination images of Korea using K-pop as a strong method of travel marketing due to the fact that the songs may represent Korea to the audiences