Assigning a brand to an element influences the consumer not only with respect to the element itself. The effects of this assignment may also fall on the consumer behavior regarding the brand, indirectly affecting other elements that display this symbol of identification. The effect of the product that receives the brand on consumer behavior towards the brand itself have been named reciprocal effects. To date, reciprocal effects were mainly studied in the context of brand extensions to new goods and services. The present research studies reciprocal effects in a context that has not been examined yet: the tourism brand of the country. The objective of this research is to analyze how the power of the tourism brand of the country is affected by the subjective values of destinations situated in its territory. To do that, a conceptual model was developed based on the perspective of brands as identification symbols that enable categorization of products through mental schemes. In empirical terms, the study focused on the valence and the linearity of this relationship. It also analyzed the effect of the similarity across country's destinations on the power of the national brand. A final analysis focused on the moderating role of consumer knowledge about tourism characteristics of the country falling upon the reciprocal effect of the subjective values of destinations. These objectives are useful to support a number of branding decisions, especially those regarding countries and regions' tourism brands. Two experiments were conducted in order to achieve these objectives. The first experiment addressed the effects of subjective values of destinations on the power of the tourism brand of the country in a context of hypothetical destinations and countries. It used data collected from a sample of 230 Brazilian undergraduate students. The second experiment focused on the Brazilian case by using a sample of 363 US consumers. The results evidenced the existence of the reciprocal effect of subjective values of destinations on the power of the tourism brand of the country. The experiments also showed that this effect is not linear, but increasing with respect to the subjective values of destinations. The effect of the similarity across destinations on the power of the national tourism brands was not supported by empirical data. Similarly, the moderating effect of knowledge about tourism characteristics of the country on the reciprocal effect of subjective values of destinations was not evidenced.Keywords: brand, reciprocal effect, tourism marketing, consumer behavior.
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IntroduçãoMarcas permitem associar elementos a determinadas categorias mentais.Consequentemente, esses elementos se tornam alvo de inferências sobre suas propriedades desconhecidas (BOUSH, LOKEN, 1991;PARK, MILBERG, LAWSON, 1991) e se tornam associados a significados próprios da marca. Desta forma, o valor subjetivo do elemento identificado pela marca é diferente daquele relativo ao elemento sem marca (KAPFERER, 2008;KELLER, 1993). Essa influência...