Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
interview. It was assumed that at the early decision-making stage, confusion about destination
branding and images was likely to occur as at this stage a tourist would have limited knowledge
compared with a tourist who is at a later stage of decision-making. The assumption was that
tourists who were at later stages of decision-making would exhibit different types of confusion,
such as travel choice, rather than destination brand/image issues.
A total of 52 images were used during the photo elicitation interview. The major destination
attributes of Thailand that are most cited in the literature were selected. All attributes, including
negative attributes, infl uencing the image assessments of Thailand were integrated into the
interview protocol of the study. These images represented the country's attributes from both
marketing (induced image) sources such as advertisements and the promotional campaign
from DMO and non-marketing (organic image) sources such as books, TV, documentary,
news, fi lm and word-of-mouth. Both stereotypes and lesser-known images were included.
Importantly, some images which are not from Thailand were also included, so as to challenge
and generate conversation related to confusion regarding the typical view that participants
held of Thailand. This also helped to trigger thoughts and feelings tourists held towards
the destination brand and to understand the consumer's behaviour when they were confused.
The use of a mixture of destination images from a variety of sources during the photo
elicitation process was found to be very useful in generating a discussion on the confusion of the
potential tourists.
After the data collection process, thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview
transcriptions using an inductive approach. The analysis focused around three main areas of
destination brand confusion: the visitors' pre-conception of destination image; the experience,
which referred to the emotions and attitudes of potential tourists toward Thailand; and the
factors contributing to destination brand confusion. Destination brand confusion is considered
upon a potential tourist's false identifi cation of the original destination during the photo
elicitation interview, which will be discussed in the following section.
Results and discussion
In this section, the most important fi ndings on brand confusion that emerged from the data are
summarized. The fi ndings suggested that an individual tourist can experience more than one
type of confusion, as different types of confusion resulted from different factors. Moreover, the
study revealed that travellers who were highly involved with their travel intention were more
likely to be in a stage of destination brand confusion than travellers who had less immediate
travel intention. This also shows a signifi cant role of brand confusion during the early decision-
making stage of tourists. Different types of confusion through destination brand and image were
found. Emotion-related brand confusion towards the destination was also discovered.
One type of destination confusion found,
Destination Similarity Confusion
, refers to the
situation where potential tourists perceive one destination as another without knowing their
mistake. This similarity confusion arose when respondents selected images which were based on
generic attributes, such as beaches and seaside, which Thailand shares with other countries of
South East Asia. Here consumers selected images based on their assumption that each scene was
in Thailand. This referred to the most common forms of similarity confusion when consumers
think that one product is the same as another (Foxman
et al
. 1992). In the study, potential tourists
were prone to similarity confusion when they were faced with similar-looking stimuli of a
destination which made them think that all of the attributions were from the original destination.
This concurs with Walsh and Mitchell (2010), who suggest that similarity confusion can be
caused by stimuli that are similar to those that individuals learned in the past. Loken
et al
. (1986)
