37 TOURISM DESTINATION IMAGE – Contributions by Statia Elliot
37 TOURISM DESTINATION IMAGE – Contributions by Statia Elliot
To walk in another’s shoes
stroll far streets
hear music and language
feel climate
shop, eat, worship
experience another world
and discover me.
I wrote this poem while working on my PhD, living for a year in Hill’s View Villa, Seoul. Born and raised in Canada, to be surrounded by a foreign culture and immersed in image theory, inspired my thesis, A Comparative Analysis of Tourism Destination Image and Product-Country Image (Elliot, 2007). My goal was to advance place image theory through research that combined knowledge from the two fields of marketing that dealt most extensively with place image: Tourism Destination Image (TDI) – the effects of beliefs, ideas, and impressions that a person has of a destination; and Product-Country Image (PCI) – the effects of “place” image on buyer attitudes toward products from various origins. Although the focus of both fields is the influence of place image on consumer behaviour, each had developed independently of the other, and notwithstanding their common object of interest, there had been no systematic research that fully combined the two perspectives. I set out to undertake the first ever in-depth cross-fertilization of ideas between these two significant fields of research, to break down silos.
Developing the first integrated model of place image
To explore relationships between cognitive and affective dimensions of place, and tourism and product beliefs and behaviours, I developed a theoretical model by merging research and knowledge from both tourism and product-country fields. The resulting Integrated Model of Place Image (IMPI) incorporates a mix of TDI and PCI image measures, comprising eight constructs and 26 variables, as a framework for the analysis of any place of interest (Figure 1).
I first tested my IMPI model using consumer survey data from South Korea to compare image measures of two countries, the U.S. and Japan (Elliot, Papadopoulos & Kim, 2011), further expanded (Elliot & Papadopoulos, 2016) with data from Canada and two more target countries, in a 2×4 analysis using Structural Equation Modeling. The results revealed that cognitive country image had greater influence on product factors, affective country image had greater influence on destination factors, and familiarity only influenced product beliefs and behaviours. Of greatest interest to me, consumer beliefs exhibited a strong cross-over effect, particularly in the direction from product beliefs to destination receptivity. In other words, a consumer who is familiar with a country’s products and positively evaluates that country’s products will be more receptive to the idea of travelling there. The influence of destination beliefs on receptivity to a country’s products, though weaker, was also evident. The study not only revealed how the general country, product, and tourism components of country images were related, but also what image emerged for each country. For exampl