Tourism Destination Branding with Emphasis on Identifying the Dimensions of the Destination Brand Personality for Guilan Province

Abstract

There are many emotional fields between people and the destinations they visit. The personality traits of these destinations are a new dimension that can be formulated by focusing on destination branding strategies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify the dimensions of tourism destinations brand personality for guilan province using the mixed research approach and in the form of two parts, qualitative and quantitative. At the implementation stage, 55 personality traits in guilan province were identified through depth interviews with 11 experts who have at least 5 years of experience, continuous work in tourism and marketing related positions and have a masters degree or higher and content analysis of text data and their coding in the qualitative research section, and then 65 personality traits were added to the research literature study. Then, by removing the duplicate traits, a list of 102 personality traits was prepared and available to 15 others academic scholars in management and psychology to select the closest personality traits to describe the province. Finally, 16 features remained in the list, and the basis was for questionnaire design and distribute among tourists. Analysis of data collected from 468 tourists using exploratory factor analysis led to the identification of three dimensions with a unique, warm and stylish titles. These dimensions and their 16 sub-character traits were once again confirmed in the confirmatory factor analysis and Lisrel software.