Local University Students’ Perceptual Map of a Destination Brand

Local University Students’ Perceptual Map of a Destination Brand
Shaoxing City in China
ZHOU Luyang, WANG Weidong
School of Business, Shaoxing University, P.R. China, 312000
[email protected]
Abstract: This paper views that destination brand as a holistic brand conception, and uses the
attributes-based perceptual map technique to describe the static meaning of the positioning conception.
With a case study of Shaoxing City in China, two main attributes historical culture and comprehensive
function in local university students’ perception are achieved, and Shaoxing’s local university students’
perceptual map is drawn. It indicates that Shaoxing has a big inferiority to Hangzhou in terms of natural
landscape, shares almost the same price level as its neighboring cities, takes a great advantage of
historical culture over the neighboring cities, but leaves a big gap of comprehensive function below
Hangzhou and Shanghai. This discovery offers some guides for Shaoxing City’s future tourism
branding.
Keywords: Holistic Brand Conception, Perceptual Map, Static Positioning
1 Introduction
The university students’ tourism consumption is now becoming an interesting academic domain in the
fields of tourism marketing (e.g. Kim & Jogaratnam, 2003; Li & Bao, 2000; Jin and Lang, 2004).
China’s universities now have almost 30 million students, offering a big potential tourism market. The
adult universities students have a lot of spare time and strongly desire to travel to see the outside world.
With their higher educational background, university students usually have a unique and more cultural
understanding of tourism and destination brand, which has a vital influence on destination brand
propagation and communication. Thus, university students are a tourism market segmentation that
cannot be neglected.
Shaoxing City as a destination brand is one of China’s most famous scenic spots. It is one of China’s
famous historical cultural cities with southern Chinese riverside-town scenery. It has abundant tourism
resources. Now in Shaoxing there are more than 200 scenic spots, among which Luxun Museum, Orchid
Pavilion, Kuaiji Mountain, Keyan Tourism Holiday Center, Xinchang Great Buddha Temple, and Zhuji
Wuxie Scenic Spot are 4A-level scenic spots. Shaoxing has 28 famous scenic spots, one of is
national-level scenic spot, seven of which are provincial-level scenic spots, two of which are
national-level water conservancy project scenic spots, one of which is national-level geologic park.
Shaoxing City now is aimed to build itself a strong brand of tourism destination, which requires a good
and appropriate brand positioning strategy. A scientific survey using techniques such as perceptual map
will serve this aim.
When a city launches tourism marketing activities aimed at the university students, it should first and
foremost focus on its local university students. Since university students in China are from all over the
country, their viewpoints or comments about the city can be transmitted to all parts of the country. So
this paper aims to draw a perceptual map to analyze the status quo of Shaoxing City’s destination brand
positioning among its local university students and to offer some useful information for its further
marketing and branding.
2 Theoretical Backgrounds
2.1 Holistic Brand Conception and Destination Brand
Academically there are conflicts about what brand is. These conflicts can be divided into two types of
109
brand conceptions: the traditional brand conception and the holistic brand conception. The traditional
conception views brand name as an addition to the product, and believes that branding aims to help
identify the product ( e.g. AMA’s brand definition Gardner and Levy 1955; Aaker 1991; McCarthy and
Perreault 1991). Shocker, Srivastava, and Ruekert(1994) noted that more attention is needed to be paid
to “the development of more of a ‘systems view’ of brands and products to include how intangibles
created by the pricing, promotional, service, and distribution decisions of the brand manager combine
with the product itself to create brand equity and affect buyer decision making.” Thus a holistic
conception of the brand, which combines brand name and product together as brand, is put forward.
Heretofore the holistic conception achieves at least three strong supports. The first support is from
customers’ brand concept. As a matter of fact, customers who buy and consume a brand are associating
the product attributes and the satisfaction from them with the brand, or in other words, customers’ brand
concept covers or includes the product per se (Vázquez, et al, 2002). So customers hold the holistic
brand conception. The second support is from the brand identity theory. Brand identity theory attempts
to use the brand identity as a wide meaning terminology to describe brand and include the product as a
part of the brand (e.g. Aaker, 1996; Kapferrer, 1992), which extremely enriches the connotation of the
brand conception. The third support comes from the strong correlation between the product and the
brand name. Some conceptual researches indicate that it is not easy to divide the product attributes from
the brand attributes because there is strong interrelationship between them (Ambler and Styles 1995,
1997; Ambler 1996; Crainer 1997). Vázquez et al (2002) empirically confirmed the truth that the
consumers’ utility associated with the product and the one associated with the brand name are highly
correlative.
The traditional brand conception confuses the relationship between the brand name and the product with
the relationship between the brand and the product. The holistic brand conception considers the brand
name and the product/service as inseparable components of the brand. The holistic brand conception is
more consistent with the customer’s brand connotation, offering a more integrated and more
comprehensive theoretical basis for the brand management field such as brand formulation and brand
extension and so on (Achenbaum and Bodga 1996; Ambler and Styles 1997), and setting a more
internally consistent logical starting point for the brand theories such as brand equity theory.
In the domain of marketing a brand can be either of product or of service (Aaker, 1991; Clifton, 2003;
Murphy, 1998; Ward, Light, & Goldstein, 1999). Therefore, some destination brand definitions (e.g.
Blain et al., 2005; Cai, 2002) are directly based on the brand definition of marketing, and some people
believe that the brand of product is similar with the brand of service (de Chernatony and Dall’Olmo
Riley, 1999). Some researches thus intactly borrow the methodologies of branding in marketing to study
the destination branding (e.g. Cai, 2002; Prebensen, 2007; Woodside et al., 2007).
When traveling tourists are placing themselves in the midst of the destination, which shows that
destination brand is quite different from the normal consumption brand. Thus, it is more justifiable and
more appropriate to examine the destination brand from the holistic brand conception view.
；
2.1 Static Meaning of Positioning
Positioning theory originated from the criticism of the fact that the information that advertisements offer
is disordered and confused for the customers (Trout, 1969). To date, there are two kinds of positioning
definitions, the dynamic meaning and the static meaning.
The dynamic view considers positioning as an activity and process. Accordingly, positioning is the
process that the marketers try to build certain image or unique identity in the mind of the customers of
the target market (Trout, Rivkin, 1996), or the process that the firm or the product takes shape of
differences from the rival’s (Domingo, 1988). Dynamic positioning is a process of communication with
the customers (Park, 1986).
The static view considers positioning a state or result. Accordingly, positioning is customer’s whole
perception about the firm or the product or the service in contrast with the rival’s and the firm can affect
the perception (David, 1996). And brand positioning means the brand concept understanding by the
110
brand owner (Sengupta, 1990; Joachimsthaler & Aaker, 1997), and also means the customer understands
of the brand, including the understanding in terms of function and non-function (Park, 1986; Aaker,
1996).
As stated above, the static positioning meaning is the result or content of the dynamic positioning. When
re-positioning is required, the static meaning is what the dynamic positioning is based on. The static
positioning is the status quo of the position of a brand, while the dynamic positioning is the adjustment
of the status quo.
Positioning starts with offering feasible difference from the rivals (Kotler, 2004), and ends in leaving
impressive different images in the customer’s mind (Lilien & Rangaswamy, 2005). So a brand is not
isolated but is compared with other brands when customers talk about their brand perception. So a
brand’s static positioning is the target customer’s overall perception compared with other brands, and it
is what the perceptual map technique is used to measure.
3 Methods
3.1 Perceptual Map Technique Selection
Perceptual map is a plane figure which simply and clearly describes what customers are aware of a
brand. Since the positioning theory has been put forward for 40 years, perceptual map is one of the most
important contributions in the field of marketing research. Although the way that perceptual map
oversimplifies the complicated marketing structure will obstruct making optimal strategy, it does offer
important information from consumers’ perspective about the changes in competition, the status quo of
positioning and their contributing factors, which are critical basis for re-positioning. There are three
kinds of positioning maps: perceptual map, preference map, and comprehensive map. There are three
main techniques in each kind of map drawing: perceptual map drawing based on attribute data,
perceptual map drawing based on similarity data, and comprehensive map based on customers’
perception and preference data. When there are differences among the brand’s or product’ attributes that
customers are not difficult to understand and assess, the perceptual map drawing technique based on
attribute data is especially effective. Compared with other positioning map drawing techniques, the
perceptual map based on attribute data is more contributive to identifying the main dimensions of the
attributes. Additionally, even when the sample number of brand or product that customers perceive is
very small, the perceptual map can still be successfully drawn based on the attribute data. These
advantages meet the needs of this study. So this paper adopts the technique based on the attribute data to
draw the perceptual map.
The perceptual map analysis based the attribute data includes several main step: (a) to select a group of
brands and define their main attributes, (b) to gather attribute data, (c) to select the method of drawing
perceptual positioning map, usually to select the factors analysis Method, (d) to explain the result of the
factors analysis (Lilien & Rangaswamy, 2005).
3.2 Destination Brand Attributes of Shaoxing
Wang (2006) indicated four kinds of attributes of a destination brand: (a) aesthetic attributes (including
four sub-attributes: pleasure, rareness, uniqueness, and intactness), (b) entertainment attributes
(including four sub-attributes: participation, appropriateness, scale, and supporting facilities), (c)
cultural attributes (including four sub-attributes: history, science, arts, and celebrities), (d) economy
attributes (including five sub-attributes: economic situation, economic latent value, accessibility,
popularity, and environment). A destination brand study on Jiuzhaigou of China suggests that destination
brand attributes can be divided into three aspects: (a) resource value and cultural environment (including
seven factors such as traffic, popularity, and so on), (b) hospitality services (including six factors such as
price, accommodation, and so on), (c) natural tourism resources and environment (including five factors
such as ecology and so on) (Wu, et al, 2009). Based on both these literatures and a focus group
discussion with Shaoxing University students, this study obtained seven destination brand attributes of
111
Shaoxing City: natural landscape, historical culture, the number of scenic spots, the scale of the scenic
spots, supporting facilities (such accommodation and traffic), price level, and popularity.
3.3 Data Collection
A questionnaire is designed to investigate Shaoxing City’s local university student’s perception of the
seven attributes as stated above, where the Liker 5-point scale is adopted with 1-5 respectively meaning
strong disagreement, some disagreement, uncertainty, some agreement, and strong agreement. Five
Shaoxing’s neighboring cities are chosen as its rival destination brands: Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai,
Wenzhou, and Jiaxing. Seven item are included in the questionnaire as the following: (1) the natural
landscape of the city is overall good, (2) this city’s historical scenic spots generally are rich in the
educational value, (3) there are many scenic spots in this city for me to visit, (4) in this city, the scale of
scenic spots are usually very large, (5) this city’s accommodation, traffic and other supporting facilities
are generally very good, (6) the price of the admission tickets or the retailing price in this city is quite
acceptable, (7) this city is very famous. In May of 2009, 300 questionnaires were sent out to the local
university students in Shaoxing City, and 209 valid questionnaires were acquired.
4 Results
Table 4-1 is the mean value of the seven attributes of the six cities. Data analysis shows that the two
variables natural landscape and price level are not correlative enough with other variables, so only five
variables are used in the factors analysis: historical culture, number of scenic spots, scale of scenic spots,
supporting facilities, and popularity. Four steps of the factors analysis (Song, Xie, He, 2008) were taken
as the following:
Shaoxing
Hangzhou
Ningbo
Shanghai
Wenzhou
Jiaxing
Table 4-1
Mean value of the seven attributes of the six cities
Natural
Historical
number of
scale of
Supporting
landscape
Culture
scenic spots
scenic spots
Facilities
3.6
4.33
3.75
2.89
3.17
4.13
3.9
4.35
4.15
3.75
3.67
3.39
3.66
3.58
3.72
3.37
3.44
3.89
3.77
3.9
3.17
3.09
3.11
3
3.36
3.23
3.33
3.1
3.01
3.27
Price
level
3.07
3.15
3.16
2.92
3.15
3.21
popularity
3.71
4.51
3.87
4.47
3.44
3.16
(1) Check whether the five variables are fit to do the factors analysis. KMO value is 0.495, close to 0.6,
which means maybe it is not appropriate to do the factors analysis. But the Bartlett test of sphericity
shows Asymp. Sig=0.03, which means the five variables are correlative, and they deserve the factors
analysis.
Table 4-2
1
Rotated Factor Matrix
2
Comprehensive function
Historical culture
Historical culture
0.106
0.992
Number of scenic spots
0.847
0.529
Scale of scenic spots
0.974
-0.046
Supporting facilities
0.936
-0.318
Popularity
0.957
0.218
112
(2) Formulate the main factor variables. Based on Table 4-2 Rotated Factor Matrix, two new main
factors are formulated, namely, Comprehensive function, which is strongly correlative with four original
variables (number of scenic spots, scale of scenic spots, supporting facilities, and popularity), and
Historical culture, which is the same as the original variable historical culture.
Table 4-3 Values of the two main attributes
Comprehensive function
Historical culture
Shaoxing
-0.78409
1.74059
Hangzhou
1.24503
0.64394
Ningbo
0.33695
-0.53447
Shanghai
1.01885
-0.4578
Wenzhou
-0.77941
-0.90975
Jiaxing
-1.03732
-0.48251
(3) Rotate factors to make them more interpretable. The two factors extracted from the original five
factors, shown in Table 4-2, can interpret 97.629% of the original information.
Historical culture
Figure 4-1 Local university student’s perceptual map of Shaoxing
and its neighboring cities
(4) Calculate the value of the two main attributes and then draw the scatter diagram. Through the factors
analysis the values of the two main attributes are acquired as shown in Table 4-3. Then in Figure 4-1 the
scatter diagram of the two main attributes is draw with SPSS, which is also the perceptual map.
5 Conclusion and Discussions
113
Analysis based on mean value of the seven attributes of the six cities in Table 4-1 shows what is in the
mind of the local university students of Shaoxing: in terms of the attribute of natural landscape,
Shaoxing is quite weaker than Hangzhou, but almost at the same level of other neighboring cities. As for
the price level, all the six cities are almost the same.
The position of Shaoxing in the perceptual map indicates that in the mind of its local university students,
Shaoxing takes an outstanding advantage over its neighboring five cities, lightly stronger than Hangzhou,
but far ahead of Wenzhou, Jiaxing, Ningbo, and Shanghai. In terms of Comprehensive function,
Shaoxing is far lagging behind Hangzhou and Shanghai, which means that its local university students
feel that Shaoxing’s numbers of scenic spots, scale of scenic spots, supporting facilities, and popularity
is very inferior to those of Shanghai and Hangzhou.
The results and conclusions of this study by and large give explanatory notes to Shaoxing’s local
university students’ touring inclination: although Shaoxing is a historical and cultural famous city in
China, but its number of scenic spots, its scale of scenic spots, its supporting facilities, its natural
landscapes, and so on can not satisfy their needs; while the price level in Shaoxing is almost the same as
its neighboring cities, its local university students often travel to Hangzhou or Shanghai at the weekend
or during the summer or winter holidays. And also because of its shortage in number of scenic spots,
scale of scenic spots, supporting facilities, and natural landscapes, when non-local tourists come to
Shaoxing they often spend very short period of time in Shaoxing.
This study focuses on the local university students of Shaoxing, so the conclusion is only applicable to
Shaoxing local young student tourists. But thanks to the internet and other factors, nowadays
information dissemination among cities is very fast. Youth students are familiar with the information
dissemination tools such as internet, so this study’s conclusion is representative of certain significance,
but it can not take the place of examinations over a much larger area.
References
[1]. Aaker, D. A. Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name. New York: The
Free Press, 1991.
[2]. Aaker, D. A. Building Strong Brands. The Free Press, New York, 1996.
[3]. Achenbaum, A. and Bogda, P. "Brand equity is only a piece of the puzzle", Brand Week, 1996, Vol.
37, No. 34, pp. 14-17.
[4]. Ambler, T. and Styles, C. "Brand development versus new product development: toward a process
model of extension decisions". Journal of Product and Brand Management, 1997, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.
222-234.
[5]. Ambler, T. and Styles, C. "Brand equity: towards measures that matter", PAN'AGRA Working
Paper, No. 95-902, London Business School, 1995.
[6]. Ambler, T. "Measuring marketing performance", PAN'AGRA Working Paper, No. 96-904, London
Business School, 1996.
[7]. Blain, C., Levy, S. E., & Ritchie, R. B. Destination branding: insights and practices from
destination management organizations. Journal of Travel Research, 2005, 43: 328–338.
[8]. Cai, L. A. Cooperative branding for rural destinations. Annals of Tourism Research, 2002, 29(3),
720-742.
[9]. Clifton, R. The future of brands. In R. Clifton (Ed.), Brands and branding. New York, NY:
Bloomberg Press, 2003: 227–241.
[10]. Crainer, S. El Verdadero Poder de las Marcas, Madrid, Eresma and Celeste, 1997.
[11]. De Chernatony, L. and F. Dall’Olmo Riley. Experts’ Views about Defining Service Brands and the
Principles of Services Branding. Journal of Business Research, 1999, 46:181-192.
[12]. Domingo, Edward. The Fine Art of Positioning. The Journal of Business Strategy, March/April,
1988, 34-38.
[13]. Gardner, B., and S. Levy. The Product and the Brand. Harvard Business Review, 1955,
114
33(2):33-39.
[14]. Jin, Pinbin; Lang, Fupin. An Analysis of University Students Tourism Behavior Characteristics: a
Case Study of Universities in Hangzhou [J] The Journal of Tourism, 2004, 19(4): 19-22. (in
Chinese)
[15]. Joachimsthaler, E. & David A. Aaker, "Building Brands without Mass Media", Harvard Business
Review, Jan.-Feb. 1997
[16]. Kapferer, Jean-Noël. Strategic Brand Management, The Free Press, New York (2nd edition, 1997,
Kogan Page, London and New York, 1992.
[17]. Kim. K, Jogaratnam. G. Activity Preferences of Asian international and domestic American
university students: An altemate basis for segmentation [J]. Journal of vacation Marketing, 2003,
9(3): 260-270.
[18]. Kotler, Armstrong. Marketing (6 Ed.). Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2004: 1-4. (In Chinese)
[19]. Lilien, L. G. and Arvind Rangaswamy. Marketing Engineering. China Renmin University Press and
Pearson Education North Asia Limited, 2005. (In Chinese)
[20]. Li, Limei; Bao, Jigang. A Study on University Students Tourism Behaviors: a case of Zhongshan
University [J]. The Journal Guilin College of Tourism, 2000, (11). (In Chinese)
[21]. McCarthy, J. E. and Perreault, W. D. Basic Marketing: a Managerial Approach, Homewood ILL,
Irwin, 1991.
[22]. Murphy, J. What is branding? In S. Hart & J. Murphy (Eds.), Brands: The new wealth creator (pp.
1-12) New York: New York University Press, 1998.
[23]. Park, Whan C., Bernard J. Jaworski, Deborah J. Maclnnis. Strategic Brand Concept-Image
Management [J]. Journal of Marketing, 1986, 50: 135-145.
[24]. Prebensen, N. K. Exploring tourists’ images of a distant destination. Tourism Management, 2007,
28, 747~756.
[25]. Sengupta, Subroto. Brand Positioning [M]. New Pelhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company,
1990.
[26]. Shocker, A. D.; Srivastava, R. K.; and Ruekert R. W.. Challenges and Opportunities Facing Brand
Management: An Introduction to the Special Issue[J], Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 31,
May,1994, p149-158.
[27]. Song, Zhigang; Xie, Leilei; He, Xuhong. SPSS 16 Using Textbook [M]. Beijing: People’s Post and
Telecommunications Press, 2008: 246-251. (In Chinese)
[28]. Trout, J. " ‘Positioning’ is a game people play in today’s me-too market place", Industrial
Marketing, 1969, Vol.54 (6): 51-55.
[29]. Trout, J. and Rivkin, S. The New Positioning : The latest on the world’s #1 business strategy,
McGraw Hill, New York, 1996.
[30]. Vázquez, R., Belén del Río, A., & Iglesias, V. Consumer-based brand equity: development and
validation of a measurement instrument. Journal of Marketing Management, 2002, 18, 27-48.
[31]. Wang, Qiongying. Discussion on Tourism Resources Assessing System Based on Tourism
Attributes [J]. The Journal Guilin College of Tourism, 2006, 17(6): 677-680. (In Chinese)
[32]. Ward, S., Light, L., & Goldstein, J. What high-tech managers need to know about brand. Harvard
Business Review, 1999, July-August, 85-95.
[33]. Woodside, A. G., Cruickshank, B. F., & Dehuang, N. Stories visitors tell about Italian cities as
destination icons. Tourism Management, 2007, 28, 162-174.
[34]. Wu, Tiehong; et al. Destination Attributes, Tourists Attitude, and Post purchase Behavior: a Case
Study of Jiuzhaigou [J]. The Journal of Tourism, 2009, (5): 36-42. (In Chinese)
115