Assessment of factors affecting destination brand value in tourism industry( shiraz city)

Tourism industry has experienced an increasing growth rate in the past decade, being a significant income source for many developing countries. But Iran, in spite of its rich and extensive tourism-related assets, has gained only a small share of this global market. One of the strategies in attracting visitors for countries is Destination Branding. The tourism marketers view every country as a brand. For this reason, the subject of destination branding has received worldwide attention over the last few decades. The aim of the present research is to analyze effect of brand equity of the tourism destination on revisiting. On this basis, Shiraz city was selected as the tourism destination and a conceptual model with 5 variables and 9 hypotheses was formulated. Lack of research works concerning measurement of destination brand indicates that it is complicated to conceptualize the quality of destination brand evaluation by tourists. The current research analyses the empirical information in order to develop the destination brand equity model. In this research, the tourists who have traveled to Shiraz in spring of 2012 were chosen as the research population. Then, using Cochran’s formula and convenience sampling, questionnaires with 22 questions were designed and distributed among 330 members of this group of tourists. The number of usable questionnaires was 270. LISREL software was used in the present research. For testing research hypotheses, the structural equation modeling was applied and at the end, the 5 hypotheses were approved. The results of data analysis demonstrate that, among all the variables, value of destination brand on loyalty had the largest effect on destination brand value.