城市型旅游目的地品牌性别气质：量表开发与实证检验

Gender Dimensions of City Brand Personality: Scale Development and Validation

与消费品品牌一样,城市型旅游目的地品牌同样具有性别气质,但学术界尚未对此进行实证研究。文章基于两项实证研究考察城市型旅游目的地品牌的性别气质。研究一以学生为被调研者,以北京、西安、厦门和广州4城市为研究对象,开发了城市型旅游目的地品牌性别气质的测量量表,发现北京和西安是男性化的城市,杭州和厦门是女性化的城市。研究二在研究一的基础上,以真实游客为被调研者,以南京、成都、武汉和郑州4城市为研究对象,证实南京和成都是女性化的城市,武汉和郑州是男性化的城市,从而进一步验证了研究一的结论。文章开发了测量目的地品牌性别的量表,该量表具有理想的信度和效度,而且具有良好的应用性。最后,文章为旅游目的地利用品牌性别气质进行营销提供了针对性的管理建议,并对未来研究方向进行了展望。

City brand personality is one of the most important issues within destination marketing studies and gender dimensions(masculinity vs femininity)are important aspects of brand personality.City brand personalities have gender dimensions similarly to product brand personalities.Unfortunately,the gender dimensions of city brand personality have not received sufficient attention from researchers in recent years.In this paper,two studies were conducted to investigate the gender dimensions of city brand personality.Four cities-Beijing,Xi’an,Hangzhou,and Xiamen-were taken as examples in the first study and students from Guangzhou universities were selected as the research sample.In the second study,another four cities-Nanjing,Chengdu,Wuhan,and Zhengzhou-were taken as examples and real tourists were targeted to collect data.Exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis,and t-tests were used to analyze the data.The results support the idea that the gender dimensions of city brand personality are masculine and feminine.The former comprises seven items:masculine,doughty,magnificent,straightforward,ambitious,generous,and irritable.The latter comprises seven items:peaceful,exquisite,sweet,amorous,tender,gentle,and beautiful.The scale developed in this study achieved high levels of reliability and validity.It is quite short and can be applied easily.These results suggest some useful guidelines to help destination management organizations(DMOs)to manage their brand-related activities successfully.First,DMOs can use the scale developed in this study to better understand the gender dimensions of their city brand personality,as well as the differences between the gender dimensions perceived by tourists and those expected by the DMOs themselves.Second,DMOs can position or reposition their city brand personality by consciously shaping the gender dimensions of their destinations.For example,DMOs can select a logo that emphasizes either the feminine or the masculine components of the destination or develop brand slogans that highlight some gender-specific dimensions,such as adventurousness for a masculine brand personality or gracefulness for a feminine brand personality.Third,DMOs can study the gender dimensions of their competitors to design better marketing strategies to counter these dimensions.For example,if two cities are geographically close but have different gender dimensions,collaborative or dislocation marketing strategies can be used for these two cities to maximize the effectiveness of their destination marketing.This study has several research directions.First,researchers can employ a different sample to further demonstrate the results of this study.Second,given that only eight cities were chosen as research objects,further studies may investigate whether these findings can be replicated for other destinations.Third,factors influencing gender dimensions of city brand personality were not studied and future studies may focus on this research issue because if we can understand which factors are influential and how they influence the gender dimensions of city brand personality,we can better understand the differences between two cities with the same gender dimensions.