An empirical study to find important factors on building national brand: An Iranian tourism case study

Article history: Received May 20, 2012 Received in Revised form July, 29, 2012 Accepted 15 August 2012 Available online 21 August 2012 Building national brand plays an important role on today's economy to attract interested tourists in visiting various countries. There are different factors impacting national brand such as advertisement, natural attraction, etc. In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation to find the impact of ten most important factors on building brand. The study designs and distributes a questionnaire among 384 international tourists who visited Iran during the year of 2010 and it uses factor analysis to group important factors. The results extract four groups; the first factor includes three most important components including satellite advertisement programs, public awareness on economical power and public awareness on specialized symposium and conferences. The second factor includes three other important factors, which are public awareness on human right, advertisement programs through distribution brushers and internet advertisement. The third factor includes two variables, which are public awareness on education and access to educational services and introducing cultural heritage. Finally, the last factor includes introducing natural attraction and advertisement programs through distribution brushers. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
There are many evidences to believe that globalization plays an important role in today's world and all countries must create their own brands for introducing their identities to others (Aaker, 1991;Aaker, 1996;Aaker, 1997;Aaker & Shansby, 1982;Kleppe et al., 2002;Keller, 2008;Pike, 2009).People try to build value added brand for their identities to attract more tourist to their countries (Gilmore, 2002;Lodge, 2002;Mathieson & Wall, 1982) and governmental agencies play essential role on introducing countries' image to other people in various around the world (Harrison, 2002;Morgan et al., 2002).These attempts are accomplished to help economy and eventually builds good image for countries (Starr, 2001;Hall, 2002).National brand plays an important role on countries' identities.
There are many evidences to analyze the impact of issues happened after September 11 accident in Iraq and Afghanistan and to find out how much of 18 trillion dollars value of national brand in United States has been jeopardized (Kra, 2002).
Target marketing is one of the most important ways for introducing a combination of various cities and locations for tourists as a package (Hall, 2002;Mill & Morrison, 1992).Target marketing includes two important performance measures including identification and distinction (Florek, 2005).There are literally various factors for promoting tourism industry such as image, word of mouth, etc. (Baloglu & Brinberg, 1997;Kapferer, 1996).Cai (2002) introduced brand identification and brand image as two important factors for promoting brand.However, there are some contradictions in such definition discussed by Florek (2006).Nevertheless, a good image from a particular city, village or a country creates a value (Ryan & Gu, 2008).Baloglu and McCleary (1999) introduced a model of destination image formation.Paswan et al. (2003) investigated nation branding loyalty towards the country, the state and the service brands.There are literally different studies, which indicate that a comprehensive image from a country's brand is built through evaluating all aspects of the country (Baloglu, 1996;Baloglu & Mangaloglu, 2001;Baloglu & McCleary,1999).Zarabi and Ahmadi (2012) presented a study for ranking different cities and villages in province of Isfahan based on analysis of social indicator during the statistic period 1996-2006.They explained that one of the primary governmental concerns is to understand the level of economical and social development in different locations of a country.Understanding social and economical characteristics of different cities help provide necessary assistance for underdeveloped areas and promote some value added activities such as tourism in better-developed areas.They presented an empirical study based on Factor Analysis to rank different towns, villages and cities located in city of Isfahan, Iran in terms of various socio-economical criteria.The study gathered necessary information from 1996 to 2007.The results of the survey indicate that three cities of Feridan, Nayeen and Falavarjan are in the best position in terms of different social and cultural criteria while Lenjan, Barkhar and Mymehand Isfahan are located in the worst positions.Tabrizi et al. (2012) explained that many countries compete to gain political, economic, social and cultural advantages.In addition, cities are trying to demonstrate their predominance on local and regional levels and achieve development by using managerial science.Meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions tourism (MICE) hosting as a significant element of urban tourism is one of the effective methods to obtain urban development around the world.However, no specialized planning and independent investments in regard to these activities have been organized in Iran.Aiming to identify suitable areas in the northern part of Iran, they tried to recognize the necessary physical and location related (P.L) indexes to perform the specialized activities of MICE tourism in this region.They first identified indispensable indicators to accept special role of MICE tourism and then they adapted some areas based on GIS and fuzzy method.Their result map showed that a ribbonlike area near the Caspian Sea with two wide lands at central and western parts was a proper choice to host MICE activities in the region from the viewpoint of P.L indexes.
In this study, we use factor analysis to detect important factors influencing building brand in Iran.The organization of this paper first presents details of the survey in section 2. Section 3 presents details of the study and finally concluding remarks are given in the last to summarize the contribution of the paper.

The proposed study
The proposed study of this paper considers the effects of the following items on domestic brand.

Introducing natural attraction has positive influence on building domestic brand (En). 2. Public awareness on human right has positive influence on building domestic brand (Hu).
3. Public awareness on education and access to educational services has positive influence on building domestic brand (Edu).4. Satellite advertisement programs have positive influence on building domestic brand (Sad).5. Advertisement programs through distribution brushers have positive influence on building domestic brand (Lad).6. Internet advertisement has positive influence on building domestic brand (Iad).7. Advertisement in foreign journals has positive impact on building domestic brand (Mad).8. Introducing cultural heritage has positive impact on building domestic brand (Her).9. Public awareness on economical power has positive impact on building domestic brand (Eco).10.Public awareness on specialized symposium and conferences has positive impact on building domestic brand (Sem).
The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 384 people who have already visited Iran as tourist.The questionnaire maintains two parts, in the first part we ask them about their personal characteristics and the second part of the survey includes 40 questions on 10 important factors impacting building national brand.Cronbach alpha was calculated for this survey as 0.84, which is well above the minimum desired level.The first step on examining the data is to test whether the data are normally distributed or not.We also use Kolmogorov -Smirnov test to verify this item.Table 1 shows the results of our test.As we can observe from the results of Table 1, we cannot reject the null hypothesis for five hypotheses in five cases when the level of significance is five percent.However, since there are more 30 observations, according to central theorem using we may t-student.Table 2 shows details of our findings,

Table 2
The results of t-student on all components of hypotheses (degree of freedom =72) As we can observe from the results of Table 2, all null hypotheses are rejected and we can conclude that all ten factors influence building national brand.However, these ten components have various impacts on building national brand.In other words, natural attraction has the highest impact followed by advertisement in foreign journals, introducing cultural heritage and internet advertisement.While public awareness on specialized symposium and conferences maintains the lowest impact followed by satellite advertisement programs, advertisement programs through distribution brushers and public awareness on human right.

Factor analysis
Factor analysis plays an essential role on detecting important factors and grouping them into smaller groups.Table 3 shows the correlation factors among ten various factors.Before we perform factor analysis we need to make sure they maintain meaningful information using KMO test.Here, the null hypothesis is that all variables have correlation with themselves while the alternative hypothesis specifies that variables do not maintain correlation with themselves.The results of KMO test yields 0.635, which means there are good correlations among data for factor analysis.In addition, Bartlet test also yields 172.592 with 45 degrees of freedom, which confirms KMO test when the level of significance is one percent.Table 4 shows initial factors with their extraction values.As we can observe from the results of Table 4, for instance, advertisement programs through distribution brushers demonstrates 83% of common factor.Since most factors maintain more than 50% of extracted factors, we can conclude that they are suitable as basis for factor analysis.Table 5 shows, the number of extracted factors along with their eigenvalues, percentage of variance and accumulated percentage of variance.Table 5 shows details of our factor analysis using Varimax rotation technique.As we can observe, factors one to four with 20.226%, 18.211%, 17.496% and 12.664%, respectively represent 68.597% of total variance.One of the useful ways to find a suitable level to detect optimum numbers of factors is use Screet plot.According to this plot, when the changes become linear, we may detect the optimal number of factors.Fig. 1 shows Screet plot for the proposed study of this paper.

Fig. 1. Screet plot
It is clear from the figure that we can extract four factors.Table 6 shows portions of each factor before rotation is applied.The numbers are within -1 to +1 and once they get close their border numbers the factors are more important.Table 7 demonstrates the factor analysis after rotation is applied.Based on the results of Table 7, the first factor includes three most important components including Satellite advertisement programs, public awareness on economical power and public awareness on specialized symposium and conferences.The second factor includes three other important factors, which are public awareness on human right, advertisement programs through distribution brushers and internet advertisement.The third factor includes two variables, which are public awareness on education and access to educational services and introducing cultural heritage.Finally, the last factor includes introducing natural attraction and advertisement programs through distribution brushers.Finally, Table 8 shows details the correlation matrix among four variables.
Based on the results we have accomplished from Table 8, the first factor is associated with providing awareness in non-written form in other countries while the second factor is associated with written form of advertisement in other countries.The third factor is associated with awareness on Iranian culture and the last factor is related to natural attractions of this factor.Although some other factors such as human rights and economical conditions are also important factors but since Iran is located in special geopolitical region it could impact all factors either directly or indirectly.In summary, we can conclude that Iranian advertisement techniques outside the country play the least important impact on building national brand and they are not properly implemented.In fact, many tourists receive their information through different social pages, historical monuments, natural attractions and these are main sources of their awareness for traveling to Iran.Many people claim they had little information on Iran prior to their trip but their trip to Iran significantly added to their awareness.This could simply show that government programs did not have good impact on people's motivation for travelling to Iran.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to find important factors influencing people for traveling to Iran as tourists.The proposed study designed a questionnaire and distributed among different people and using factor analysis detected important factors in four groups.Based on the results of this study, the first factor includes three most important components including Satellite advertisement programs, public awareness on economical power and public awareness on specialized symposium and conferences.The second factor includes three other important factors, which are public awareness on human right, advertisement programs through distribution brushers and internet advertisement.The third factor includes two variables, which are public awareness on education and access to educational services and introducing cultural heritage.Finally, the last factor includes introducing natural attraction and advertisement programs through distribution brushers.The results also indicated that Iranian advertisement techniques outside the country play the least important impact on building national brand and they are not properly implemented.In fact, many tourists received their information through different social pages, historical monuments, natural attractions and these are main sources of their awareness for traveling to Iran.

Table 1
The results of Kolmogorov -Smirnov

Table 3
Correlation data

Table 4
Common initial values using factor analysis with no rotation

Table 5
Factor analysis using Varimax rotation technique

Table 6 Table 7
FA before rotation FA after Verimax rotation and normalization