Chinese city brands and semiotic image scales: a tourism perspective

ABSTRACT

While many researchers have documented the characteristics of China's growing tourism market, a comprehensive image scale of city brand for tourism has not yet been developed. This study investigates a semiotic image scale of city brands to encapsulate the contextual background of China and its ability to increase tourism efforts. This study attempts to extend the semiotic mapping of consumption values to city brand and develop it into an image scale of city brand in the perspective of tourism practitioners. In the process of developing an image scale for understanding the perception of the consumer's city brands, this study utilizes semiotic mapping of consumption values to analyse the consumer's image vocabulary. The image vocabularies are categorized into four quadrants (mission, project, euphoria, and information) as illustrated in the semiotic mapping of consumption values. In the Chinese context, the developed image scale extracts the value orientations of excellence, effectiveness, pleasantness, and convenience with these four quadrants to comprehend city brand in tourism perspective. By combining the measurement development with the reality of city tourism in China, the image scale will help to systematically understand the city brand image expressed through tourism in China.

KEYWORDS:

• City brand
• brand image
• image scale
• tourism perspective
• Chinese city branding
• semiotic mapping of consumption values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhaoyuan Ye

Zhaoyuan Ye is Assistant Professor in Department of Journalism, College of Liberal Arts and Law, Changsha University of Science & Technology in China. He obtained his Ph.D. degrees in Communication Science from the Konkuk University in South Korea. His areas of research focus on multiple areas of brand communication including region brand, tourism brand, culture brand and product brand for comprehending inter-field branding strategies.

Hyeong-Yeon Jeon

Hyeong-Yeon Jeon is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Language and Culture at the Mokpo National University in Mokpo. She obtained her Ph.D degrees in Communication Sciences from the University of Lyon2 in France. Her areas of research include multimodal branding as luxury branding, regional branding, channel branding, and cultural semiotic analysis for understanding of brand communication strategies.