Impact Of Sport Mega-Event On Destination Brand

Nowadays, there is growing recognition that countries need to compete to each other for global resources. The increasingly fierce competition of bidding for the host of mega-event indicated its important role in the field of place marketing. Since tourism is one of the world’s fastest growing, but also most competitive industries, mega-event’s impact on host destination’s tourism is gaining more and more attention.This paper was conducted to study the mega-event’s impact on the host country’s tourism from the branding point of view. After literature review of previous studies on destination image and branding, a pre-test and post-test research was designed to evaluate the impact of the 2006 FIFA World Cup’s impact on Germany as a destination brand among the Chinese residences. This mainly focuses on whether the event can increase the brand awareness, improve the brand image and then influence potential tourists’travel intention towards GermanyData was analysed via Independent Sample T-Test and Hierarchical Regression via SPSS software. The findings supported the previous study that mega-events are supposed to bring positive impact on the host destination in terms of tourism. More specific, the importance of destination’s affective image in tourism marketing was stressed. In addition, in consistent with previous studies, media’s salient intervene role was also unearthed. The validity of this study supported that the knowledge of product branding can be adopted to enrich the study of destination marketing.