Destination Umbrella Brand Image Based On Prototype Theory

Nowadays,the increasingly fierce tourism competition has made branding become the core strategy of destination marketing management.As an effective marketing tactic,umbrella brand has been widely used in the marketing practice of regional tourism destinations,but still there is a short of theoretical research.The research starts up with brand image,a specific dimension that has been noticed by many scholars.While the concept of umbrella brand is rarely mentioned.Umbrella brand image includes umbrella brand image and many sub-brand image.It can be explained from the perspective of category and prototype in marketing practice.Then it is possible to build a destination brand image strategy based on the prototype theory.First of all,on reviewing the relevant research of regional tourism brand and destination umbrella brand,this paper constructs a three-level structure of destination umbrella brand as "umbrella brand-city brand-scenic spot brand".Combined with the research of tourism destination image and prototype theory,this paper constructs the conceptual model of destination umbrella brand image,city prototype brand image and scenic spot prototype brand image,and puts forward 3 path hypotheses.Secondly,with the strategy of "One Belt One Road",this paper chooses the typical tourism brand umbrella "Silk Road" as an example.Through analyzing the travel journals from Website,it constructs the three-level structure of the Silk Road destination umbrella brand.Based on the extension of the prototype theory,this paper identifies and extracts the two-level prototype brand of the Silk Road umbrella brand,namely the city prototype brand--Dunhuang,and the scenic spot prototype brand--Qinghai Lake.Then,designing questionnaire and scales to collect data for verifying the research hypothesis.By calculating the data obtained from the questionnaire with SPSS19.0 and Amos20.0 software,the concept model and the research hypothesis are tested by descriptive statistic analysis,reliability and validity test,first order and second order confirmatory factor analysis and final structural equation model analysis.The results show that: first,the city prototype brand image has a significant positive impact on the regional destination umbrella brand image;second,the scenic spot prototype brand image has a significant positive impact on the city prototype brand image,and third,the impact of the scenic spot prototype brand image on the regional destination umbrella brand image is not significant.Finally,based on the analysis results,this paper proposes several suggestions for the brand marketing of Silk Road:first,taking the city prototype brand as the core of regional destination brand umbrella marketing;second,constructing the city prototype brand and the scenic spot prototype brand marketing alliance;and third,the image of city non-prototype brand and the scenic spot none-prototype brand not only should have common with the image of prototype brand,but also should keep its own characteristics.