A Comparative Study Of The Perceived Image Of The Tourism Market And The Projected Image Of The Destination

After nearly four decades of development, the development of tourism destinations in China has entered into the stage of quality improvement from the quantity expansion stage. Shaping and spreading an attractive and competitive tourism destination image plays a vital role for the competition of the tourism market. Projected image is the image that marketing organizations spontaneously emit. Perceived image refers to the sum of the beliefs, thoughts, expectations and impressions generated by potential and real tourists. The matching degree between the projected image and the perceived image has not been studied by domestic and foreign scholars at present. Therefore, the research on the matching degree of the perceived image and the projected image has a great significance for the tourism destination image study and marketing.This paper takes Xi'an tourism destination image as an example. The objects of the paper are the projected image emitting by official website, travel agencies, travel agents, tourist information, travel channels and the perceived image of domestic tourist.who have visited Xi'an. The paper applied content analysis, co-word analysis, social network analysis, correspondence analysis to study the matching degree of perceived image and projected image. Finally, it puts forward the marketing suggestions to optimize the tourism destination image.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:First of all, the main projected image of Xi'an tourism destination is the ancient city and the secondary image is the city of snacks. Compared with Xi'an marketing image, "A civilized place, a natural space", the image of "A natural space" has not been well projected.Secondly, the main perceived image of the domestic tourists is the ancient city and the secondary image is the city of snacks. Compared with Xi'an marketing image, "A civilized place, a natural space", the image of "A natural space" has not been well perceived by the domestic visitors.Thirdly, the matching degree between projected image and perceived image is higher on the "tourist attraction", "local atmosphere" and "tourism environment". But there are obvious differences on the "infrastructure" and "leisure and entertainment".Fourthly, overall, perceived image and projected image has very small difference.The main projected and perceived image of Xi'an tourism destination are both the ancient city, and the secondary image is the city of snacks. From the percentage of vocabularies of the five image dimensions, tourist attraction is the main content of the perceived image and projected image. And, perceived image and projected image are the same on the "scenic spots" and "snacks". Although the vocabularies of other dimensions occupy a certain proportion, but far less than the proportion of tourism attractions.The innovations of this paper:The study combines the network text data and the questionnaire survey data to test the matching degree between the projected image and the perceived image. Therefore, the study can enrich the research content of tourism destination image. And it also has a certain reference value for the marketing practice of the destination image.