Brand Equity Model of Tourism Destination

[[abstract]]Facing with the competitive tourism market, there are more and more destination marketers start to apply brand theory to tourism destination marketing. More specifically, they create the destination brand equity by using a series of marketing activities based on a clear and unique brand positioning, and the construction of brand elements (such as symbols, slogans). Researchers also begun paying their attention to the exploration of destination brand equity model, nevertheless, there is still no consistent results found. As to Taiwan, brand equity model has been applied to many tourism industries, but few of them have focused on the destination. Under this circumstance, more fundamental researches are still need for the further understanding of destination brand equity, in order to be the basis for destination branding practice. The purposes of this study is to realize the factors which affect the destination brand equity, and further more to investigate the structural relationship among the destination brand equity dimensions. The study constructed a tourist-based destination brand equity model based on the previous researches, and selected Kaohsiung City as target for empirical test. This study finally obtained 470 valid samples by on-line and on-site survey. The structure of the tourist-based brand equity after two-stage confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that the brand equity of Kaohsiung City are composed of "brand awareness", "affective image", "cognitive image", and "brand loyalty". As to the structural relationship among the four brand equity dimensions, the results tested by Structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that "brand awareness" has direct positive impact on "affective image", "cognitive image", and “brand loyalty”; both the “affection image” and “cognitive image” has direct positive impact on “brand loyalty” respectively; the “cognitive image” has direct positive impact on “affective image”. Some tourism marketing implications for Kaohsiung City are also provided based on the results