관광목적지 마케팅 커뮤니케이션과 브랜드지식및 방문의도간의 관계연구

Abstract

Destinations are considered as brands. It is important for destinations' managers to build their own brands due to its influence on intention to visit. Therefore at the destination level, marketing communications should be able to focus on forming brand knowledge to promote and encourage its potential visitors. For the last decade, there has been tremendous growth in Chinese tourism demand. The number of Chinese outbound tourists has increased to approximately 110 million as of December of 2014. At the same period, the number of Chinese visitors to Korea and Jeju was recorded at 6 million and 2.9 million respectively. This growth has considerably attributed to Chinese tourism market in Jeju. Accordingly, it is necessary to study empirically on marketing communication effect especially to potential Chinese visitors, their brand knowledge as well as intention to visit Jeju. It can also be very meaningful to confirm empirically their structural relationships due to little research regarding these variables to potential Chinese visitors. This study is to mainly examine the structural relationships among destination marketing communications, brand knowledge along with those effect and role, and intention to visit to confirm causal relationship. Other main purpose on this study is to conduct empirically through exploratory as well as confirmatory analysis after measuring brand knowledge by multi-attribute approach. Theoretically this study is to suggest that destination image should be measured by not single but multi-attribute like cognitive and affective image for its exact measurement. This study adopted reference study through literature review, practitioners' interview, deductive and quantitative approaches, empirical study as the research method. For this research, there has been frequency analysis for demographic characteristics, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with corelation analysis, regression analysis for mediating effect, and structural equation modeling to confirm the causal relationships. The main survey for this study has been conducted by man-to-man interview with probing as well as self-administered questionnaire survey method in Shanghai China from October 13 to October 17 in 2015 after its pilot test in Jeju. Data used for final analysis was collected from potential visitors. 350 questionnaires were distributed randomly. Finally, 266 were used except some questionnaires with missing marking, questionnaires with respondents experienced in Jeju from the analysis. The findings showed that research model was reliable and valid through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. CFA model fit also indicated indices acceptable. The linear and multiple regression analyses suggested that there was significant in mediating effect of brand knowledge with marketing communications and intention to visit. The result of proposed model analysis through structural equation modeling showed that partially causal relationship between marketing communications and brand knowledge, causal relationship between marketing communications and intention to visit, partially causal relationship between brand knowledge and intention to visit. Theoretically, the final results implied that brand image is considered multi-attribute when measuring brand knowledge so that cognitive image and affective image can be reflected in the context of unique roles and characteristics respectively. Managerially, there are some implications as follows: Firstly, indicated that marketing strategy should reflect its means according to influential factors out of marketing communications on brand knowledge. Secondly implied that exposure through advertising and PR regarding Jeju has been influencing potential Chinese intention to visit. Especially, advertising is significantly associated affective image as well. Thirdly, relationship between brand knowledge and intention to visit showed that both cognitive and affective image formations are critical to visit intention. There are some limitations in this study. Firstly, The result is limited to generalize for Chinese due to the survey conducted only in Shanghai. Secondly, there can also be some limitations in choosing words and conveying those meaning of measuring items due to their translation Korean into Chinese. Thirdly, advertising and PR only were used as marketing communications components except sales promotion, personal selling and so on due to characteristics of limited destination marketing communication. For further studies on potential Chinese visitors, it is necessary to enlarge its survey cities, to consider other variables such as word-of-mouth, marketing PR. Hopefully, there should be longitudinal studies due to essentials to follow up the global environmental changes.