CUSTOMER-BASED BRAND EQUITY FOR A TOURISM DESTINATION (CBBETD): THE SPECIFIC CASE OF BANDUNG CITY, INDONESIA

. This study examines in detail the use of customer-based brand equity for a tourism destination (CBBETD) as a strategic tool for use with a specific city (Bandung City, Indonesia in this instance). The CBBETD scale developed by Konecnik (2005) and empiricized by Konecnik and Gartner (2007) was successfully adapted using qualitative and quantitative refinements for the city of Bandung. A sample of 400 visitors to Bandung was surveyed, and empirical psychometric assessment was run. The scale required minor adaptations but was found to be appropriate for use in this new context. The components of customer-based brand equity for a tourism destination were found to be: awareness, image, quality and loyalty. The successful adaptation of the scale is encouraging as it provides strategic insight on strengthening destination positioning in the minds of both current and future tourists. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are provided.


Introduction
ere is li le question as to the importance of branding as a marketing strategy tool. Successful companies depend upon branding e orts to a ract and maintain customers through identifying a unique position for their product/service o ering (Keller, 1993). Cities as tourist destinations also bene t from concerted branding strategies (Kemp et al., 2012). In today's global world of tourism, traveling to distant vacation destinations is increasingly popular. As a result, the competition between cities to a ract more tourists is intensifying. In order to enhance their tourism revenues, cities must develop e ective city branding strategies to stand out in potential tourists' minds as viable choice possibilities. is kind of strategy will e ectively build upon such a ributes as unique cultural heritage and local amenities (Ashworth & Kavaratzis, 2009). As Hankinson (2001Hankinson ( , 2004 suggests, it is vital for cities to create a brand which immediately generates images and expected experiences which will enhance the chance of travelers choosing that city over others competing for their business. e key according to Hankinson and Cowking (1993) is the creation of a relationship between the brand and the consumer so that the values associated with the city brand immediately mesh with the desires of the consumer. It is important to note here that city branding is not just for the bene t of tourist destination choice. It also enhances the chance for the city to obtain new residents, new businesses and new nancial investors as well as travelers. All of these potential a ractees will bring economic growth to the city that e ectively presents itself as a preferred destination and a place to live and work (Popescu, 2012).

Branding Literature
According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is "a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and service of one seller or group of sellers and to di erentiate them from those of competitors" (Keller, 2008, p.2). Brands help consumers to identify and di erentiate goods and services. Brands also play an important role in building relationships between customers and products. Obviously a destination is a product under the de nition of brand, but place branding is quite complex as there are so many facets to a city as a location for branding purposes given the economic, social, cultural, political and technological issues associated with cities as products (Anholt, 2004;Kerr, 2006;Koenig, 2011). In order to address the various facets of a brand associated with a city, the process for image building will require a longer time horizon and require cohesion in terms of city policies and marketing e orts to build consumer credibility due to the variety of constituencies involved with no clear ownership and transient political o ces (Freire, 2005;Dinnie, 2011).
ere are three main elements that are necessary to consider in the branding of a city as a travel destination (Hadrikurnia, 2011). e rst element involves the physical components of the city (i.e., buildings, infrastructures, etc.). e second element includes the individual components of the city (i.e., people, citizens, and tourists who are all a ected by cultural factors -which creates di erent values, beliefs, and characteristics; social factors, personal factors, such as personal objectives, personal preferences, and so on; and psychological factors). e third element involves organizational elements (i.e., the group that consists of individuals who share the same objectives, beliefs, etc.). What becomes more nebulous in the branding process is the creation of trust in the various constituencies of the city regarding what the city is doing to protect and enhance the living conditions for all of its residents and visitors (Kavaratzis, 2008;Underwood & Fray, 2008;Konig, 2011). e challenge is that while cities have a variety of di erent target audiences to serve, the core brand position must be consistent (Dinnie, 2011). Brand Equity e concept of brand equity is important when addressing branding strategy. Brand equity involves the assets, liabilities and value added to a brand involving the product or service's name and accompanying logos and symbols, which help it to be di erentiated from all other competitors (Aaker, 1991;Kamakura & Russel, 1993;Keller, 2008). Keller (1998Keller ( , 2008 suggests that brand equity is comprised of brand awareness, brand image, perceived brand quality, and brand loyalty: Brand awareness involves the consumer's recognition of the brand. It is about how to move the brand to a top-of-mind position in his or her head. Logos, tag-lines, packaging and such are things that can create this type of awareness for consumers.
Brand image is about any association related to a brand that helps the customers di erentiate the brand from the others. In order to create a close t between brand positioning and the expectations of the consumer, the image of the brand must be e ectively communicated with the goal of alignment with what the consumers see and expect to get from the use of the branded product/service. Perceived quality becomes crucial in terms of brand equity as it a ects the awareness, image, and also the customer's loyalty. It a ects the image of the brand, particularly in terms of perceptions of price and value. Perceived quality is a major a ector of brand loyalty and ultimately rm pro tability.
Brand loyalty is at the core of brand equity. e customer who feels a bond with the brand will exhibit loyalty towards the brand. In this era of relationship marketing, keeping the customer loyal will result in increasing positive e ect in terms of volume of purchases and positive word of mouth. e tighter the t between the brand and the individual, the more important the brand becomes and the more loyal the customer will become.

Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) and Travel Destinations
In order to create strong brand equity, especially for a place, destination, or a city, it is vital to analyze brand equity from the standpoint of the consumer and his or her perceptions of the location in question. e concept known as customer-based brand equity was de ned by Keller in 1998 as "the di erential e ect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of that brand". is study builds heavily on the foundation built by Keller regarding customer-based brand equity, and it is extended to the particular application involving tourist destination cities in the use of Customer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination (CBBETD) as proposed by Konecnik (2005) and later empiricized by Konecnik and Gartner in 2007. Table 1 provides an overview of the literature re ecting the CBBETD construct. e rst mention of the construct was by Konecnik in 2005 in which the proposed four components as discussed by Keller (1998) were suggested with regard to a tourist destination city. is was later re ned and the manifestations associated with the four sub-dimensions of CBBETD were presented in the study by Konecnik and Gartner in 2007. e authors found that the four dimensions worked well in the development of a brand equity measure for a tourist destination. ey found that awareness entailed what tourists know or perceive about the destination in question asking whether they had heard of the city, what characteristics came to mind, and recognition of pictures, tag-lines and logos connected to the city. ey also found that brand image involved what they perceived about the image associated with the city destination, its surroundings, and its amenities (e.g., nature, landscape, weather, cultural o erings, etc.). is dimension was later found by Konecnik (2010) to be the most critical component of CBBETD in terms of customer choice of a travel destination. e third dimension, brand quality, was also found to be important for its impact upon consumer behavior (Konecnik & Gartner, 2007).
is dimension focused on the respondent's perception of how high the quality was of the overall environment surrounding the city destination (e.g., the quality of the accommodations, food, atmosphere, personal safety, services and value for money). Brand image deals with what comes to mind in terms of city a ributes given the city name and general image have been created while brand quality deals with the perceptions of quality associated with those particular a ributes. Finally, the fourth dimension is brand loyalty, which was found to have a signi cant impact upon the choice of a particular destination (Konecnik & Gartner, 2007). is dimension focused on intention to revisit the city along with desire to recommend the destination to others.
is construct has proven to be important in a consumer destination choice, and tourism research has built upon this seminal work (cf., Cai, 2002;Gartner & Ruzzier, 2011;Gnoth, 2002;Konecnik, 2004Konecnik, , 2010Konecnik & Gartner, 2007;Olins, 2002;Tasci & Gartner, 2009). e conceptual framework for the study is found in Figure 1. Purpose of the Study e purpose of this study is to further develop and test the Consumer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination (CBBETD) construct scale in the context of the third largest city in Indonesia, Bandung, and examine the impact of CBBETD on destination preference. e psychometric properties of the scale will be examined in this new context and regressions will be run to examine causal relationships between CBBETD and destination travel planning and preferences. e two major research questions for this exploratory research focus on the possibility of the scale to be adapted and utilized for the city of Bandung: RQ1: Can the Consumer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination (CBBETD) scale be adapted for the city of Bandung?
RQ2: Which of the sub-dimensions of Consumer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination will be useful for strategic decisions regarding tourism in the city of Bandung?

Bandung City
Bandung is the capital city of West Java Province. It is the third largest city in Indonesia a er Jakarta and Surabaya with a population of around 2.5 million. In Dutch colonial times, Bandung is known as 'Parijs van Java' related to its European ambiance. e city is also known as ' e Flower City' due to its prevalent trees and gardens. Bandung has many historical heritage buildings and houses the Asia-Africa museum in the building which served as the site for the Asia-Africa Conference held in 1955. In terms of climate, the mountains surrounding the city provide a conduit for cooler, pleasant temperatures.
Research Methodology e research methodology uses the foundation for the CBBETD scale as developed and tested by Konecnik (2010) and Mok Kim Man (2010). As there were some changes in the manifestations of the scale for CBBETD, and since the scale was not heavily tested in prior research, Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to test a new version of the scale for use in a Bandung-speci c context. Extensive qualitative assessment was utilized to identify relevant manifestations for the four sub-dimensions associated with CBBETD (awareness, image, quality and loyalty). e research involved the use of questionnaires in a face-to-face se ing using domestic and international visitors to Bandung as well as the use of online questionnaires with those who are considered to be visitors to Bandung. ere were 250 completed questionnaires from locations around Bandung and 214 that were lled out by quali ed Bandung visitors bringing the total sample size to 465. e elimination of problematic questionnaires reduced the nal sample size to 400. e data were collected in January of 2012 with no resident of Bandung being utilized. All respondents were either Indonesians from other parts of the country or international visitors.
For the CBBETD measure, the measures of awareness and loyalty are borrowed measures, while the sub-dimensions of image and perceived quality are modi ed measures. In the previous research conducted by Mok Kim Man (2010) for Sabah State, adaptations to the Konecnik (2010) measure were made to include such a ributes in image as good beaches, lovely town and cities, modern health resort, which were not appropriate for Bandung city so those items were eliminated from the scale. Other relevant a ributes that were appropriate for Bandung were then added to re ect important aspects such as beautiful Dutch architecture, comfortable resorts and hotels, interesting events, and delicious cuisine. Also there was a need to add relevant items to perceived quality such as the ease associated with nding helpful information and ease of access. A complete listing of all of the manifestations that made up the CBBETD scale is found in Table 2.  (Konecnik & Gartner, 2006) Image -as the most critical dimension in CBBETD (Konecnik, 2010) Quality -which is a vital element a ecting consumer behavior (Konecnik & Gartner, 2006) Loyalty -which in uences tourism decision, especially destination choice (Konecnik & Gartner, 2006)

Respondents
In collecting the data, the portion of male and female as the correspondent is almost the same -208 (52%) female and 192 (48%) male. In terms of the age of the visitors, most (256 or 64% of the total) were in the 18-24 age range. is re ects the fact that many visitors to Bandung represent di erent schools and school groups or visits with their family. e next largest group of respondents (99 or 24.75% of the total) were aged from 25 to 34. e remainder included 45 (11.25% of the total) aged more than 35 years. In terms of stated occupations, the majority (232 or 58% of the total) identi ed themselves as students or scholars. e other respondent categories represented were employed (98 or 24.5%), self-employed (49 or 12.25%), housewives (19 or 4.75%) and the retired (2 or 0.5%). Finally, in terms of national origin, the vast majority were from West Indonesia (343 or 87.75%), followed by Asian not from Indonesia (22 or 5.5%), Middle Indonesian (20 or 5%), European (6 or 1.5%), North American (3 or 0.75%), Australian (3 or 0.75%), East Indonesian (2 or 0.5%) and other (1 or 0.25%). What is worth mentioning is that out of 400 visitors 365 were all from Indonesia as opposed to only 35 from other areas.

Testing of CBBETD as a Valid and Reliable Measure
Validity analysis results are shown in Table 3. Looking at the table, all of the variables can be considered as valid since the KMO value is above 0.5 for each. Table 4 shows the Cronbach Alpha Coe cients to re ect the reliabilities associated with each of the sub-dimensions. Factor analysis was run to check the various components of CBBETD. e rst of the sub-dimensions to examine is awareness. Respondents' awareness of Bandung as a tourism destination is actually quite high as can be seen in Table 5. Most of the respondents can easily recognize Bandung as a tourism destination. Most of the respondents can easily remember some characteristics of Bandung (mean 4.04) and can picture Bandung in their minds (mean 3.96). Unfortunately, the respondents tend to be unsure about any symbols or logos associated with Bandung as a tourism destination (mean 3.40). Moreover, factor analysis was conducted since the results of using KMO (Kaiser, Meyer, Olkin) measures at 0.733 were above 0.5, and Bartle 's test below 0.05 -which is signi cant. Two of the items were found to be problematic and were removed from the analysis. e remaining three items are found to load highly on a single factor. ese three items are able to explain 54.39% of the observed variance, and the reliability is reasonably high at 0.770 (from Table 4). e second sub-dimension that was examined is image. ere were a number of scale items that were eliminated since they did not clearly resonate with the respondents or were part of factors that were super cially relevant or simply redundant. e analysis potentially suggested four separate factors, but two of these were problematic with very low loadings indicating validity concerns. Two were eliminated leaving only two items which focused on the events and the museums, and these were identi ed as Old Style/ Historical and the other was labeled as Ambiance Image. e two groups of items are seen in Table 6. What was supported by our qualitative work is that while many items were descriptive of the city and its surroundings, only the old style o erings focusing on the historical aspects (museum and cultural/historical events) were relevant in what was termed Old Style and those aspects associated with city ambiance re ecting such features as atmosphere, weather, shopping facilities, entertainment and nightlife. Our qualitative work did indicate that the knowledge of the tourists concerning other aspects of image (the mountains, surrounding amenities, etc.) were not particularly strong, so the results are not surprising. e removed items allowed us to rerun the factor analysis with fairly straightforward results as can be seen in Table 6. e fact that the original work had produced many items which were not necessarily appropriate for research involving Bandung re ects the need for this type of perceptual scale to be adapted for each new tourism destination context. e third sub-dimension is quality. e factor analysis results can be found in Table 7. In this case there were two separate sub-scales that were identi ed. One focused on manifestations associated with cleanliness and environmental concerns while the other concentrated on services provided and accessibility. When looking at the reactions of the respondents to the various scale items, many problems were identi ed with the city's level of cleanliness (mean 2.86), as there is o en evidence of garbage in the surrounding area. Tourists also felt unsatis ed with the polluted environment as the city is ge ing more crowded and full of vehicles, and they also indicated problems with a lack of proper maintenance for public buildings and perceived concerns about public safety. Other aspects of city quality were more promising. Tourists found Bandung a good value for money, easy to nd information, and very accessible. e most positive reactions were for the ease of access to the city and its amenities (mean 3.63) with qualitative research indicating tourist positive reactions to the ready availability of good cafés and restaurants providing good value for money. An interesting strategic issue can be found in the fact that there was such a negative reaction of the tourists to the rst sub-dimension for quality as opposed to the reactions to the second sub-dimension. In a way the services and accessibility dimension would seem to re ect the best qualities of Bandung, with appealing local food supported by high quality of services and good value for money, but one concern that arises is that if the local food is appealing while overall service quality is perceived to be poor, this might result in overall bad feelings about service and infrastructural quality. ese somewhat opposing views of the quality of the city by the tourists create a need to look more deeply into these reactions and perceptions and consider upgrades in buildings and services to create a be er overall impression for present and future visitors. e nal sub-dimension to examine is loyalty. e factor analysis results can be found in Table 8. In this case, three of the sub-scale items proved to be problematic and factor analysis was run with the remaining four items. ese results showed high loadings on a single factor and the reliability was high at 0.835 (Table 4). Most of the respondents who have already visited Bandung stated that Bandung is one of the preferred destinations they want to visit (mean 3.92). ese tourists would like and intend to continue visiting Bandung in the future. ey even intend to recommend Bandung to others. ese four items were able to explain 51.36% of the observed variance.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the construct in question, Consumer-Based Equity for a Tourism Destination was found to be adaptable for the city of Bandung and, with some item eliminations, appropriate for use in this new context. e only problematic component would seem to be the image dimension, and this may be an issue resulting from inconsistencies that were noted by respondents and during qualitative assessments in the reactions of individuals to various aspects of Bandung city that were not meaningful to them (e.g., mountains and scenery). What does seem to be helpful is the ambiance factor that re ects such a ributes as weather and atmosphere and nightlife/ entertainment along with the old style o erings like the cultural events and museums. It was also found that there were two separate dimensional factors for the sub-dimension known as perceived quality, which is also re ective of the things discovered during the qualitative preliminary phase of the study when it was learned that there were basic inconsistencies like concerns over pollution, cleanliness and personal safety while respondents also felt that the city had good cuisine options, was a good value for money and easily made relevant information available. e use of the CBBETD measure is helpful since it does provide strategic options for Bandung to improve its positioning with current and future tourists.
ere is a need to repair buildings, clean up parts of the city, and provide be er public safety, but there is also a positive foundation to build upon as the city is seen as having good weather, nice atmosphere and provides good cuisine for its visitors to enjoy. ere are encouraging indications from the loyalty dimension that these visitors do have good experiences regarding the city and feel some loyalty and will recommend the city to others as a tourist destination.

Suggestions for Future Research
ere is certainly a potential demonstrated here for the use of this construct in future research. e scale and its sub-components should be tested in other contexts to nd commonalities that might lend themselves to more of an etic type of modeling. is type of modeling is best when it is able to re ect all relevant a ributes associated with the particular tourist dimension from the perspective of city tourism appeals and sound strategic decision making, but it is also potentially valuable to take less of an emic approach and look into the possibility of a more parsimonious scale that might be useful in a wider variety of locations. One particular issue that is worth mentioning here is that this study just built from the perspective of tourists to the city. e research on city branding discussed earlier in this paper also re ects the need to consider city branding from a variety of stakeholder perspectives as the citizens, administrative o cials and local business leaders and employees also have their perceptions of the city and its image. ese must also be examined.