The role brand equity on developing tourism industry

During the past few years, there have been growing interests in developing tourism industry in developing tourism economy. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors including brand awareness, quality perception, brand associate and brand loyalty on developing tourism economy. The proposed study was accomplished in city of Karaj located in province of Alborz, Iran. The study designed a questionnaire consist of 27 questions designed in Likert scale and distributed it among 400 randomly selected people who visited this city during the year of 2012. Using Spearman correlation, they study confirmed that there were some positive relationship between brand awareness and tourism economy (r=0.434, Sig.=0.02), a positive relationship between quality perception and tourism economy (r=0.198, Sig.=0.008), a positive relationship between brand associate and tourism economy (r=0.261, Sig.=0.000) and finally there was a positive and relationship between brand loyalty and tourism economy (r = 0.302, Sig. = 0.05). In addition, the implementation of stepwise regression model has indicated that brand awareness played essential role on tourism economy followed by brand loyalty and quality perception.