Abstract:

Prior research suggested that souvenirs are the best products for place branding because souvenirs often reflect the images of the places visited.1 However, whether souvenirs reflect the characteristics of tourism destinations is rarely investigated leading to the purpose of this paper to address this gap. More specifically, this paper used the brand personality concept to evaluate the alignment of souvenirs to destinations. The setting of this empirical research was in Japan in which destination food souvenirs are abundantly available and popular. With 5 brand personality dimensions that specifically address Japan2, this paper hypothesized that there are regional differences in destination souvenir brand personalities. A between-subject quasi-experiment that uses 36 adjectives from the brand personality dimension scale was conducted to test the hypotheses. The statistical student t-test results comparing the three groups of subjects evaluating three destinations (Hokkaido, Kyot...