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| THE MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF DESTINATION IMAGE——A Comparative Study of Nanjing |
| QU Ying, JIA Hong-yan |
| Tourism Department, School of Humanity, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China |
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Abstract Tourism destination image has been proved exerting significant positive effects on tourist's destination decision-making process in various study contexts. Foreign scholars make great theoretical establishments as well as substantial empirical investigations in this field. The conception delimitation,composition dimensions and formation process of destination image are three key areas they theoretically devote efforts to. As a whole,domestic tourism academia has not made any outstanding theoretical establishments of destination image by introducing certain well-recognized and widely-applied analysis framework. More recently,many scholars begin to be aware of the subjectivity and inaccuracies associated with their traditional study paradigm and make some attempts of alteration in their studies. Admittedly,a great progress has been made by mainland China's tourism scholars in this field in conducting market survey and quantitative statistic analysis. In view of such a situation,this article puts special emphasis on and involves in research design two frequently ignored factors in such domestic studies:tourist's demand and regional competitors. This study systematically analyzes the destination image of a focal case destination (Nanjing) by a combined use of two special image analysis methods,namely importance-performance analysis (IPA) and correspondence analysis (CA). The results of the empirical study identify the strengths and weaknesses of Nanjing's current destination image in satisfying its domestic tourist's important demand categories and Nanjing's differentiating advantageous image attributes versus its other four close competitors in the area of eastern China.
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Received: 20 October 2011
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2013, Vol. 28 
