DEVELOPING A PLACE BRANDING MODEL: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS USING SOURCE CREDIBILITY

Abstract

The concept of place branding and its related terminology have advanced noticeably over the last four decades (Braun et al., 2014; De Noronha et al., 2017; Zenker et al, 2017). The research domain of place branding is presently comprehensive and multi-disciplinary which encompasses various subjects and disciplines such as urban policy, marketing or branding, sociology, tourism and public policy (Hankinson, 2010; Lucarelli and Berg, 2011). The place branding strategy has become crucial for speedy urbanization, economic and social development of places (i.e. countries, regions, cities). This phenomenon has led to competition among places to attract residents, tourists, investors and public resources. The place which has positive image or reputation gets it easier to compete for all these resources. The place branding is a process to create and communicate the positive image to the target audiences. The positive place image or reputation helps to achieve competitive advantage. The place branding covers numerous sub-concepts such as country branding, city branding, destination branding and region branding each emphasising on a different spatial dimension (Oguztimur and Akturan, 2016). The research in place branding has been proliferated due to this growing importance of the field among academicians and practitioners. This research specially focused on destination branding which included tourists as a main target audience. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to advance the model of place branding using source credibility with the perspective of foreign tourists in the city of Jaipur (India). The destination (city) image is essential construct for building the brands, thus the proposed model of this research has been developed by integrating the key constructs of branding, involving destination source credibility, destination image (i.e. cognitive image, affective image) and destination loyalty. This research is the first effort which empirically validates the relationships of destination source credibility to destination image (i.e. cognitive image, affective image) and to destination loyalty. The prevailing literature lacks such kind of investigation. Similarly, the investigation of destination image is under researched with the perspective of India. Hence, it is indispensible to develop a scale to measure the destination (city) image in the context of India. This research is the first attempt to advance the measurement instrument of destination (city) image in Indian context. The culturally rich Jaipur city has been chosen because it is among the top tourist destination in India in term of foreign tourists‘ arrival. This research used mixed-method research design approach that united both qualitative and quantitative research methods in different phases to undertake the whole research. The qualitative research has been adopted to advance the conceptual model and development of initial scale. It was conducted using extensive literature review and in-depth interviews. The quantitative research has been used for empirical validation of measurement instrument and testing the hypothesized relationships of the proposed model of this research. The foreign tourists visited Jaipur (India) were targeted for collection of data in different phases. The numerous data analysis techniques such as EFA, CFA, and SEM were employed for validation. The findings of this research revealed that destination source credibility influences favourably on both the dimensions of destination image (i.e. cognitive image, affective image) and destination source credibility has also significant effect of destination loyalty. Similarly, both cognitive image and affective image have positive influence of destination loyalty. Hence, the crucial role of destination source credibility in building place or destination brand has been proved by this research. There is a dearth of examinations of brand or source credibility concepts in tourism setting in the extant literature. This research applied source credibility theory to tourism destination branding and tried to fill the research gap in the prevailing literature. Thus, this research contributed significantly by investigating the influences of destination source credibility on cognitive image, affective image and destination loyalty separately. This research also becomes first which develops the scale of city or destination image in Indian context by adopting rigorous scale development procedure recommended in the literature. The measurement instrument of city or destination image has been developed by focusing foreign tourists especially travelled for leisure purpose. No previous city or destination image scales in current literature have been found which targeted on foreign leisure tourists. Apart from these contributions, this research also provided numerous managerial implications.