The relationship between social media, involvement and destination brand equity

From past to present, although brand is a concept which maintains its importance in all sectors, it can be indicated primary focus in tourism sector in which delivering service is more predominant should be on this concept due to reverse procurement process. Especially for destinations which provide, organize and supervise all touristic activities, branding is more fundamental. Even though it is of crucial for destinations, measurement of branding performances of the destinations is quite difficult. On the other hand, CCDBE is a tool developed in order to assess the branding practices performed by the organizations. Despite the fact that CCDBE is quite beneficial for assessing the branding practices, it has particular deficiencies in terms of its comprehensiveness. In addition, another deficiency is that the factors affecting CCDBE cannot be sufficiently examined. It is stated promotion activities organized for the development of CCDBE would contribute to CCDBE; however, to what extent the types of contents created by customers on social media would contribute to CCDBE cannot be determined sufficiently. Furthermore, it is not clear how interest levels formed by sharing as well as types of sharing affect CCDBE. In this regard, it is targeted in the present study to develop a comprehensive CCDBE model for eliminating the aforementioned deficiencies, to examine the effect of sharing on social media and involvement levels on CCDBE and to research the mediator role of involvement in the relationship between sharing on social media and CCDBE. Alanya region was preferred for the research area and research sample is composed of domestic and foreign tourists visiting Alanya. In order to achieve the mentioned objectives in the research, data obtained from 478 respondents in total were analyzed. In addition, SEM was utilized for testing the hypotheses developed within the scope of the research purpose. According to findings, it was observed both types of sharing behaviors were important in terms of involvement levels whereas non-participant sharing behavior did not significantly affect the destination brand awareness. Nevertheless, it was found out involvement levels were affected further by non-participant sharing behavior. In addition, it was determined that involvement factor had a full mediator role between non-participant sharing behavior and the destination brand awareness while it had a partial mediator role between participant sharing behavior and the destination brand awareness. It was also observed all factors affected each other in a significant and positive way in hierarchical model developed within the scope of CCDBE. Keywords: Social Media, Involvement, Costumer-based Destination Brand Equity