A Study on Relationship among the B&B Image?Brand Personality and Willingness to Return

[[abstract]]According to the development of Taiwan?s B&B industry, due to the lack of differentiation among characters and services of B&B industry, high homogeneity cause inefficient marketing strategies on promoting and therefore further decreasing the competitiveness of the whole industry. Prior researches show that the image is an important factor on choosing the tourist site for visitors, the brand has positive influence on consumer loyalty had been proven in marketing theory. Hosany et al. (2006)fellow researchers argued that destination image and destination brand personality have highly correlation. This offered a robust evidence on brand theory across various fields. This research extended the previous fruitful results in further investigation and overall discussion. This research aims at investigating the relationship of image, brand personality and willingness to return from the marketing position. With the regional B&B as research object, this research collected totally 720 questionnaires from four regions of Chiufen, Hualien, Chinjin and Kenting. Three hundred questionnaires were randomly selected and analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) to test hypotheses in order to observe the relationships among these variables. The results indicated that B&B image positively affect B&B brand pesonality, and B&B brand pesonality positively affect willingness to return, and B&B image mediate willingness to return via the B&B brand personality. The managerial implication for B&B industry is the marketing strategy should be based on regional B&B features in order to reach the products difference, and set up visitor's loyalty to maintain the competition by differentiation on products. This will not only increase industry's competence, but also decrease the cost induced by establishing consumer loyalty, which could maximize the cost-efficient on marketing cost