Untangling the Complex and Idiosyncratic Nature of Tourist Destination Brand Equity

Research in Tourist Destination Brand Equity mainly adopts established linear brand equity models without accounting for the destination brand’s complex and idiosyncratic nature. This is the first study leveraging complexity theory and the advantages of Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to decode the Tourist Destination Brand Equity complexity. It employs a mixed-sequential design, data originating from the destination management (official websites) and tourists (semi-structured interviews and three e-surveys in different tourist markets), offering a fine-grained explanation of Tourist Destination Brand Equity formation process. The proposed Tourist Destination Brand Equity model consists of three sequential blocks: destination brand building, understanding, and relationship block, feeding into the overall destination brand equity. The results confirm the model’s structural power in all three tourist segments, while simultaneously detecting their idiosyncrasies highlighting different configurations of tourists’ destination functional perceptions and imagery attributes, structuring cognitive and sequentially affective responses fueling a solid overall destination brand equity.