IMAGE CONVERGENCE & PERSONALITY DIVERGENCE: THE STUDY OF DIFFERENTIAL BRAND POSITIONING FOR DESTINATIONS WITH HOMOGENEOUS RESOURCES
LIANG Jia1, LV Xing-yang2, QU Ying3
1. College of Tourism and Service Management, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China;
2. School of Business Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China;
3. School of Tourism, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China
Abstract：The differentiating brand positioning is an important means to obtain competitive advantages for destinations, and is heavily valued by DMOs as an essential marketing strategy. However, with the rapid improvement of tourism industry, many recently established tourism destinations emerge. Thus, based on brand personality theory and the status quo of tourism destination marketing, this research attempts to figure out new perspectives on differentiating brand positioning of tourism destination. Taking three destinations with similar resources and geographical proximity as research objects, namely Zhou Zhuang, Wu Zhen and Xi Tang, and through analyzing the travel notes and blogs posted on the internet written by tourists and advertisements and other sources promoted by DMOs, the study finds out that the perceived image of each tourism destination is alike, but the perceived personalities of those tourism destinations are significantly distinguished.The results of this study show that, in the case of convergence of tourism destination image, tourism destinations with homogeneous resources can still use divergent brand personality to carry on the differentiating brand positioning and to distinguish from competitive counterparts.
