Search results

Given the increasing dominance of medical tourism on the service economy of some of the developing nations, as a pioneering attempt, this study aims to develop a consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) measurement scale for the medical tourist destinations (city/hospital).

Following the traditional marketing construct development process (qualitative study, purification study and validation study), in the present study, two sets of large and independent samples were assessed to judge the dimensionality of the measure.

A well-validated measurement scale was developed as an amalgamation of four dimensions, namely, awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and authenticity to assess CBBE of medical destinations.

To reduce the financial and physical risk associated with the purchase of treatment, the customers may rely on “authenticity” of the service providers to select a treatment destination. The outcomes would help medical administrators/managers to focus more on developing “assurance” by increased reliability, responsiveness and tangibles to attract the medical tourists to a large extent.

The study is a pioneering attempt to develop a scale for measuring CBBE for medical tourist destinations. The study aligns with earlier CBBE scales in terms of the first three elements, namely, brand awareness, loyalty and perceived quality. However, based on predictive validity, the study puts forth five interrelated first order attributes, namely, “trust”, “value for money”, “quality of residents”, reliability and soft issues (like friendliness and ease of process) as contributing factors to a so far unexplored dimension, “brand authenticity”.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between destination brand equity and tourist's revisit intention towards health tourism destinations. The study also examines the mediating effect of destination brand association between destination-based brand equity and travellers' revisit intention for health tourism destinations.

A survey instrument is used to examine the relationships in the proposed model using the co-variance-based structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. The collected primary data from two hundred forty-six respondents (n = 246) are analysed to test the relationship amongst exogenous, mediating, moderating and endogenous constructs articulated in the proposed structural model.

Empirical findings reveal that destination brand equity influences the revisit intention of a traveller for health tourism via destination brand association. The perceived trust, reliability and soft issues of a traveller moderate the relationship between destination brand equity and destination brand association. Enduring travel involvement also proves a significant moderation effect on the relationship between destination brand association and the revisit intention of a traveller for a health tourism destination.

This paper is an initial attempt to develop and empirically examine a conceptual model of the intention of a traveller to revisit a health tourism destination in a dynamic process of information search using the data collected from current travellers after medical tourism-related trips. Results suggest that stakeholders must focus on hedonic and utilitarian factors of the destination that are recognised by travellers to encourage revisit for medical tourism.

Although there have been numerous studies on health tourism. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this research is a pioneer in the healthcare tourism literature that links destination brand equity, brand association and revisit intention of a traveller for health tourism. These findings extend the knowledge of how healthcare tourism that is embedded with destination brand equity and destination brand association. The study findings potentially benefit the marketers for gaining competitive advantages through considering the experience of a traveller.

The medical tourism market across the globe lacks a consolidated, standard customer-based brand equity (CBBE) scale till the present day. The purpose of this research is to theorize a scale with probable existing dimensions and based on prior literature adding culture and infrastructure/superstructure as new components for global comparison among BRICS and SAARC nations. This empirical research initiates laying the foundation of deriving a unified scale.

Extensive literature reviews from leading academic journals, books and web information were used to theoretically propose the scale. R (an open source coding language) was used for quantitative analysis.

Culture (environment index) and infrastructure/superstructure (industry/economic index) were found to be relevant in the context of CBBE scale for medical tourism. The other dimensions are brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality and loyalty.

The research literature was fragmented because of international scopes of medical tourism destinations as well as a variety of medical services offered. The dynamic nature of this industry, which is dependent on several factors such as healthcare, cost, related services, tourism etc. made it difficult to access the real contribution of individual items.

This paper proposes the foundation to develop a CBBE scale for medical tourism in India, adding culture and infrastructure/superstructure as new dimensions. It opens doors for new research with scale refining, branding assessment and fine-tuning items for the new dimensions.

This research is the first of its kind to create a standard CBBE scale for developing countries. It has added a new set of literature and consolidated prior contextual works on culture and infrastructure in reference to medical tourism. The questionnaire is of practical value to hospitals. The interview transcript is novel in nature for future works.

This chapter analyzes the tourism industry from national and regional perspectives, in order to understand the past and current trends in Costa Rica’s positioning and branding attributes and strategies for tourism development. The intent here is not to provide an exhaustive comprehensive literature review of academic research on country branding; and so it is by all means a case study as it describes the evolution of the tourism industry in Costa Rica – including the transformative stages the country went through since the 1980s – as planned tourism national management programs evolved toward reaching the target of creating a nature-based tourism brand. The medical industry and then medical tourism industries are analyzed in a global basis and the US market is examined in detail because of its potential to develop a new complementary niche for Costa Rica’s tourism industry. The chapter intends to asses Costa Rica’s potential to become a country brand in medical tourism, leveraged on its natural tourism destination branding status quo.

This paper aims to analyse the relationship between the image of a tourism product and destination brand equity in the context of Kerala's Ayurveda. The study also examined the influence of destination image (DI) and hospital brand image (HBI) and the mediating role of total experience (TEX).

The research analysed 342 primary data from Ayurvedic tourists who visited Kerala for the treatment.

Results show that product–place image (PPI) and DI significantly influence the brand equity, but the HBI is insignificant towards the brand equity. Even though HBI does not directly influence Kerala's brand equity, it has a strong relationship through TEX (mediating variable).

This study can be implemented by destination marketing organization and tourism authorities while making strategic decisions and plans for the image creation of a tourist place.

People perceive some products from a particular place as having superior quality and uniqueness. As far as a tourist destination is concerned, a “tourism product” associated with the destination will also uplift its popularity. The study has investigated the image of this “product–place” combination in medical tourism.

This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences.

In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification.

The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as “brand awareness”, “brand association”, “perceived quality” and “loyalty”, along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. “Infrastructure” has emerged as a new scale construct and “culture” was found to be a moderating variable for “perceived quality” in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature.

The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Americans choose a country and medical facility to travel abroad for medical treatment based on the following factors country environment, tourism destination, medical tourism costs and medical facilities and services.

Online survey with the help of Amazon Mechanical Turk website was used for data collection, and 541 valid cases were used of American residents who had travelled abroad for medical tourism. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were undertaken to validate the scales.

Findings indicated four major factors that can influence American medical tourists’ choices of medical tourism destinations. These factors are overseas’ country factors, attractiveness of tourism destination, medical tourism costs and facilities and services. Both the convergent and discriminant validities for the constructs were established. The results of the measurement-model-fit based on various measures were within the suggested cut-off values.

Out of the 541 responses of post-travel experienced medical tourists, it is hard to tell how similar/dissimilar the participants are in terms of ranking the four factors. To be competitive to attract global medical tourists, research suggests that the five popular countries of treatment, India, China, Thailand, Mexico and Turkey, identified in this study should provide high quality of medical and tourism facilities to patients.

This study contributes to the understanding of the underlying factors, which influence American medical tourists’ choice of destinations, with validated scales. For this exploratory research, 25 new items together with 34 items from other studies were adapted.

This paper aims to analyze the customer-based brand equity index (CBBE-I) of Tourism Brand Kurukshetra.

For the purpose of this study, the author uses primary and secondary data on destination attractiveness of Tourism Brand Kurukshetra for a sample of 150 tourists including domestic and international. The study used structural equation modeling and factor weighting methods.

The research presents an investigation into the destination attractiveness index of Tourism Brand Kurukshetra in an emerging market, i.e. Kurukshetra. Tourism Brand Kurukshetra from the brand equity perspective is an attractive destination.

It suggests that the CBBE index of Kurukshetra ought to analyze a longitudinal study to get the proper image of Kurukshetra from a touristic perspective. It provides long-term attractiveness to enhance tourism.

This is the first brand equity study contributed to branding literature of Tourism Brand Kurukshetra. The index is an accomplished way to present the tourism condition of any destination.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interconnection between the corporatisation of K-beauty and Korea’s nation branding exercise and its links with soft power. Through the investigation of the transformation of Korea’s beauty industry, the authors seek to illustrate the inter-relationship of the market systems and national identification practices.

This study employed the qualitative case study approach to examine the latest development of Korea’s medical tourism. Through analysing a variety of secondary data that associated to the latest development of cosmetic tourism, this paper presents the impact of the transformation and reconfiguration of Korea’s beauty industry on the country’s nation branding strategy and the development of Korea’s soft power in the global marketplace.

The findings highlight how Korea’s new cosmetic tourism industry contributed to the renewal of Korea’s nation brand in the global market. The findings also illustrate the interconnection of the emerging Korean popular cultural products (K-pop and K-beauty) in the regional and global marketplace.

The findings demonstrate the role of market in re-defining a nation’s brand and identity. The findings also illustrate how market-driven strategy influences the development of a nation’s soft power in the regional and/or global marketplace.

The study shows that practitioners can be active agents in nation branding. Through highlighting strategies to develop soft power within and beyond the country boundary, this study shows how market agents, governments and other stakeholders can co-create a market system that transform and reconfigure the nation brand in the global marketplace.

In additional to explore the transformation of the beauty industry in Korea, this paper also presents the history and transformation of the beauty standards in Korea and other Asian cultures. Such dialogue invites marketing and consumer researchers to further explore the role of history and culture in guiding the production and consumption of new (consumption) standards.

This is the first paper that connects the theory of soft power in nation branding and country-of-origin literature. The case analysis of the socio-historical development of K-beauty also demonstrates how non-Western cultural goods enter the international marketplace. In summary, this paper provides new conceptual framework that illustrates a new collaborative mechanism that engages government and practitioners to co-create new cultural norms and standards to the local and international markets.

All touristic cities have their unique attributes to showcase and differentiate themselves from others. This distinctive attribute is the unique selling product or tourism product of a particular city. It could be an art form, culture, regional climate, food and festival. Literature indicates that the identity of the entire city would be affected by such tourism products. The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of the ‘image’ of an Art-event to city branding. The study also examines the mediating role of ‘city attachment’ in the relationship between event image and city brand equity.

In all, 432 samples have been collected from visitors to one of the biggest contemporary art events in India – the “Kochi-Muziris Biennale – 2018,” conducted in the city of Cochin, situated in Kerala, the southernmost state of India.

Results show that the direct relationship between event image and city brand equity is stronger than the hypothesised path through the mediating role of city attachment.

This study provides a better understanding of the event image and its importance in creating the host city’s brand equity. It contributes to both the practitioners and tourism researchers.

This study looks at the event image through functional and affective aspects and its influence on city attachment and city brand equity.