Drivers to Build A Powerful Country Tourism Brand: An Empirical Study On Millenials Segment

Abstract

There is a wide academic literature that deals with the term Country Brand, but nevertheless, it has not been sufficiently studied the country as a powerful tourism brand. The importance of the tourism industry for many countries is indisputable, which leads to generating a brand identity of a specific tourist destination: the country. The present study is conducted among 465 millenials placed at Spain which are a very interesting segment due to their principal motivations are travelling and also are the near future decisions makers (Ng & McGinnis, 2015). The empirical research has been conducted in Spain and it will be replicated in Turkish soon. The goal of this work is to find out the main drivers that allow build a powerful tourism country brand in the millennial segment. The statistical analysis is conducted with Principal Components Factor Analysis Method that permit to discover the main underlying drivers. 11 main underlying factors, than explain more than 65% of the total explained variance, are found with a good adjustment. This factors represents the main drivers to build a strong tourism brand country. Although the univariate analysis carried out concludes that a key factor when evaluating a country like a tourism destination is security and safety, the factorial analysis reveals that the underlying driver that explains the greater percentage of the variance (16.65%) is the economic strength of the country, among other factors. Discovering the main factors in the evaluation of millennials about a country as a tourist destination allow to detect the most important drivers that determine the decision to travel to a country on the millennial segment and, therefore, can help to build a powerful tourism brand country. The main originality of this work is to develop the concept of country-brand as a tourist destination and apply it to the millennial segment. The main limitation of this study is that it is based on a sample of millenials placed in Spain, we can apply this study to other segments of population in other countries.