Seasonal Differences Of Projected Destination Image

The strategy of "Smart Tourism" points out the development direction of China’s tourism industry, which also indicates new requirements on the management and marketing of tourist destinations. To analyze topics related to destination marketing is essential for promoting the smart tourism strategy, especially destination marketing on new media. Destination image, a hot topic in destination marketing research, is under the challenge of new media, as well. Applying new media into studies on destination image is beneficial to richen its concepts. Currently, researchers have paid lots of attention on perceived image; while from the perspective of supplier, destination image has not been well studied, particularly in the context of new media. What’s more, destination image is regarded to be relatively stable. Whether the new media can make some change to destination image, as the whole society has been forced to change by new media platforms? The dissertation is proposed to provide some clues in answering this question.The dissertation consists of three main parts, which includes seven different chapters.Part I is from the first chapter to the third. Firstly, the background, methodology, contents and innovations are introduced. Followed is literature review, which summarized the research status of destination image change. It was found that the use of static attribute-based scale and perspective of tourists rather than suppliers were two main reasons for the lack of studies in this field. The third chapter focused on the building of a new theory in destination image, which aims to combine the supply-side and demand-side into one single theory. The importance of destination image from a supply-side point of view was emphasized. Also, the mechanism of seasonal changes in destination image was discussed.Part II includes chapter4to6. In chapter4,12063pieces of data were collected from25official micro blogs of China’s provincial destinations on Sina Micro-blog platform. Content analysis was used to code every piece of micro blogs with the same coding rule. Seasonal differences of projecting time and themes of micro blogs were analyzed to show the seasonal change of destination projected image. It was found that the time of posted micro blogs concentrated on working time and the themes mainly were projecting scenic spots and tourism news. Seasonal differences of themes were disclosed, as well as that of provinces’projection. While, compared with the amount of samples in this research, the seasonal differences turned to be slight. Chapter5looked into destination image change by analyzing seasonal differences in the context of projected image. Frequencies of geographic images, seasonal terms and seasonal activities were calculated and the differences between winter and summer have been discovered. However, it is indicated that the differences are not big when compared with the overall image. High frequency words were analyzed in the following part. Different high frequency words appeared in micro blogs in winter and summer. Therefore, seasonal changes were indicated by these differences; these differences slightly influenced the overall destination image. Chapter6discussed strategies to optimize projected destination image, including projection methods, seasonal marketing and exploition of seasonal products.The last chapter-chapter7is the third part of this dissertation. Conclusions were made in this chapter and the shortcomings were discussed. Future research directions were proposed then.