Investigation of the city's destination brand image in terms of touristic destination marketing: Ağri province case

The factor of production and tourism, which has become an important component of high added value production today, constitutes the engine of regional and social development in global competition. For this reason, new centers of attraction are being created all over the world and many cities are developing new programs and projects. To attract the attention of tourists in this great competition, cities are now trying to gain a competitive advantage for their destinations by positively recreating their image with people and applying branding strategies. The main aim of this study is to investigate the destination brand image of the city and to determine whether there are significant differences between the destination brand image levels in terms of the demographic characteristics of the participants. The scope of the study consists of the participants who are not painful, living in other cities and coming to Ağrı for the first time. In this study, data were collected from 429 participants using face-to-face survey method by making use of non-random sampling methods. The arithmetic means, standard deviation, frequency distribution, reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and variance analysis were used in the analysis of the data. SPSS 22.0 package statistics program was used in the analysis. As a result of the analysis of variance, significant differences were found between age, education and income levels and destination brand image.