How Potential UK Tourists Perceived South Korea as a Tourism Destination Brand

Abstract

Recently, tourists often consider travel destinations to be ‘brands’, which has a significant effect on their future destination choices. Indeed, famous destinations already have a personality that is more or less embedded in the minds of consumers. For this reason, destination marketing organizations have begun embracing various branding techniques that were previously only utilized for product brands. In this context, the paper strived to ascertain the destination brand personality with South Korea in mind. The paper employed a survey research method with both quantitative and qualitative aspects among UK respondents in order to measure the brand personality of South Korea as a tourism destination. The findings reveal ‘competence’ and ‘excitement’ were the two dominant personality dimensions that participants perceived with regard to South Korea as a travel destination. Moreover, analyzed unstructured questions identified the influential factors determinants on the overall image of South Korea's destination brand, and provided useful branding insights by showing low brand awareness and lack of information in the UK as well as associated negative perceptions, such as ‘dangerous’, ‘threatened’, ‘undeveloped’, which can hinder building a favorable and strong destination brand.