STUDY ON CONTENT AND INSTRUMENT OF DESTINATION IMAGE MEASUREMENT

Tourist Destination Image(TDI) is one of the core concepts of destination marketing.TDI can be used in market segmentation,positioning,and competition analysis.Measurement is an important branch of the conceptual framework of TDI.The data resulted from measurement are the base of theoretical research on TDI and marketing application.The content of measurement and the instruments used for it are both important to the quality of the result data.Based on the perception theory and attitude theory from consumer behavior,TDI is composed of cognitive component and affective component.The cognitive image is the tourists' belief(knowledge) about the destination.The affective image is the tourists' feeling about the destination.The former is based on the attributes of destination.The later comes from tourists' evaluation of destination.Some researches on affective image measurement have been done.But there are so many kinds of destinations,and each destination has its own attributes.So there is no standard scale to measure cognitive component of TDI..Besides structured techniques such as scale,some researchers suggest that unstructured techniques via open-ended question can be used successfully in TDI measurement.And someone has tried to use Visitor Employed Photography,another unstructured technique,to elicit TDI of a national historic site.