Cross-Cultural Model of Customer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination
The IUP Journal of Brand Management, Vol. XI, No. 1, March 2014, pp. 30-46
19 Pages Posted: 24 Sep 2014 Last revised: 27 Sep 2014
Date Written: September 19, 2014
Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to present a cross-cultural model of the customer-based brand equity for a tourism destination, encompassing four proposed dimensions — awareness, image, quality and loyalty. Previous research findings on the concept of measurement invariance are employed in the empirical investigation of the proposed model, which is tested on two competitive European tourism destinations (Slovenia and Austria) from the perspective of two culturally heterogeneous tourist groups (Germans and Croatians). The results of the cross-cultural model imply that the model is robust and cross-culturally comparable because neither the selected tourism destination nor the potential tourists’ evaluations exert an impact on the dimensions of the construct proposed in the paper. The results at different levels indicate that the conditions for configural and metric invariance are fully satisfied, whereas the conditions for scalar invariance are partially satisfied.
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