Customer-Centric Strategies in Place Marketing

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of a survey articulated into two complementary studies, performed in four districts located in Italy. These studies assess the opportunity to design destination branding strategies on the basis of customers' perceptions, providing a framework to quantitatively determine the identity of a local district and its perceived image. The chapter proposes that the perceived image of a place can be examined through the concept of perceived personality as adapted to a place, labeled as “destination personality,” and analyzed using the Big Five Model (Digman, 1990). The main contribution of the research consists in presenting a methodology for the evaluation of the consistency between the identity, the image, and the perceived personality of a district. Results demonstrate the strong validity of the destination personality construct as a conceptual tool to analyze the perceived images of local districts, and show how findings may be particularly useful for Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) to design effective marketing strategies capable of attracting and retaining resources.