Destination Branding & Advocacy: The Power of Experience Travel and tourism are important sectors that contribute significantly to the global economy. In an extremely competitive global scenario, marketers of tourist destinations focus on creating and developing a favorable and attractive image for the destination brand to attract the attention of stakeholders such as customers, investors, …
Does Destination Brand Experience Influence Destination Advocacy?
Destination Branding & Advocacy: The Power of Experience
Travel and tourism are important sectors that contribute significantly to the global economy. In an extremely competitive global scenario, marketers of tourist destinations focus on creating and developing a favorable and attractive image for the destination brand to attract the attention of stakeholders such as customers, investors, and local communities.
Branding efforts by destination marketers help to create a distinctive competitive advantage for travel destinations. Destination marketers would be successful in their efforts if consumers develop an emotional bond with a destination brand and display revisit intentions, loyalty, and aspiration to positively commend the destination to friends, relatives, and colleagues.
Destination branding can be denoted as the set of marketing activities that support the creation of a name, symbol, logo, wordmark, or other graphic that readily identifies and differentiates a destination; and consistently conveys the expectation of a memorable travel experience that is uniquely associated with the destination; serve to consolidate and reinforce the emotional connection between visitors and destination; and reduce consumer search costs and perceived risk.
Collectively, these activities serve to create a destination image that positively influences consumer destination choice. In the tourism context, the term destination advocacy (DA) has been used to denote such feelings and behavioral intentions toward a destination brand. The increased propensity for DA in tourists, along with appropriate marketing strategies, may lead customers to engage more, so it would be pertinent for destination marketing organizations to analyze drivers of DA. A holistic evaluation of the brand experience construct, based on four dimensions of the brand – sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral – concerning tourism and referred to as DBE.
The present study investigates the impact of destination brand experience (DBE) in developing DA in tourists and contends that favorable destination experiences would eventually lead to the creation of advocacy for the destination brand. Furthermore, the purpose of the current paper is to examine the role of loyalty and trust in strengthening the association between DBE and DA.
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The respondents of the study were tourists from different destinations in India. The present study has provided vital insights regarding tourist psychology and behavior, which have significant implications for various stakeholders in the travel and tourism sector.
The results of this study revealed that positive destination experiences may lead to the development of brand advocacy in tourists. This naturally indicates that the focus of destination marketers, government bodies, and other stakeholders should be on creating enhanced and consistent experiences for tourists across all interactions and touchpoints.
Destination marketers should concentrate their efforts on developing and delivering suitable experiences for tourists to encourage positive WOM and revisit the tourist destination. Travel service providers should provide content-rich promotional material and messages that stimulate cognitive thinking and self-discovery.
Memorabilia related to the destinations should also include books, audiovisual content, and artifacts that highlight the cultural attributes of the destination, philosophical thought of the region, and the spiritual experiences of tourists during their stay. Besides, because trust and loyalty have been found to strengthen the association between experience and advocacy in the context of tourism, tourism marketers need to take measures to inculcate trust and confidence in tourists and encourage them to become loyal to the destination brand.
For this purpose, travel service providers need to ensure that the perceptions of tourists exceed their expectations regarding all aspects of the travel experience – pre-trip, stay, and post-trip. Besides, suitable loyalty programs may be designed by travel service providers to encourage tourists to revisit and recommend the destinations.
Furthermore, DBE must be enhanced, leading to brand advocacy; therefore, the government and local administration need to uniquely design high-quality infrastructure that motivates visitors’ imagination, subsequently creating highly personalized memories of the experience. Also, in the context of the study results, it becomes pertinent that the government and local administration identify and focus on the most noteworthy features of the destination’s culture, history, and local way of life that differentiates it from the rest of the tourism world.
In addition, it is important to engage the tourists to enhance brand advocacy; hence, destination marketers must encourage tourists to endorse their destination brands by creating online reviews, speaking positively with others, and posting their rich experiences on various social media platforms. This also provides an opportunity to enhance their existing offerings based on consumer recommendations.
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The full research paper can be accessed here
Srivastava, S., Madan, P., Dey, B., Qadir, A., & Mathew, J. (2022). Impact of destination brand experience on destination advocacy: trust and loyalty as moderators. Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality, 17(4), 576-590
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/CBTH-01-2022-0002
