Drivers to Build A Powerful Country Tourism Brand: An Empirical Study On Millenials Segment

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 4, 579 - 596, 31.12.2019

Laura Juárez Abdullah Uslu Maria-francisca Blasco

https://doi.org/10.32958/gastoria.575092

Abstract

There is a wide academic literature that deals
with the term Country Brand, but nevertheless, it has not been sufficiently
studied the country as a powerful tourism brand. The importance of the tourism
industry for many countries is indisputable, which leads to generating a brand
identity of a specific tourist destination: the country. The present study is
conducted among 465 millenials placed at Spain which are a very interesting
segment due to their principal motivations are travelling and also are the near
future decisions makers (Ng & McGinnis, 2015). The empirical research has
been conducted in Spain and it will be replicated in Turkish soon. The goal of
this work is to find out the main drivers that allow build a powerful tourism country
brand in the millennial segment.

The stadistical analysis is conducted with Principal Components Factor Analysis
Method (SPSS vs22), that permit to discover the main underlying drivers. 11 main underlying factors, than explain more than 65%
of the total explained variance, are found with a good adjustment. This factors
represents the main drivers to build a strong tourism brand country. Although the univariate analysis carried out
concludes that a key factor when evaluating a country like a tourism destination
is security and safety, the factorial analysis reveals that the underlying
driver that explains the greater percentage of the variance (16.65%) is the economic
strength of the country, among others factors. The main limitation of this
study is that it is based on a sample of millenials placed in Spain, we can
apply this study to other segments of population in other countries.
Discover the main factors in the evaluation of
millennials about a country as a tourist destination allow to detect the most
important drivers that determine the decision to travel to a country on the
millennial segment and, therefore, can help to build a powerful tourism brand
country. The main originality of this work is to develop
the concept of country-brand as a tourist destination and apply it to the
millennial segment.

Keywords

Brand Country, Tourism Destination, Millenials Drivers

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