Destination brand love and evangelism among international tourists in Vietnam: Roles of corrective engagement, empowerment, and authenticity

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractRecent tourism studies increasingly emphasize tourists’ active roles in destination experiences, prompting closer examination of how different forms of participation relate to destination brand outcomes. This study examines how corrective engagement, empowerment experience, and perceived authenticity influence destination brand love and, in turn, destination brand evangelism among international tourists in Vietnam. Data were collected from 257 international tourists and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicate that destination brand love is a strong predictor of destination brand evangelism. Empowerment experience and perceived authenticity show positive effects on destination brand love, highlighting the roles of perceived autonomy and culturally genuine experiences in strengthening tourists’ emotional attachment. Corrective engagement exhibits a dual effect: it positively affects destination brand love but negatively affects destination brand evangelism, suggesting that improvement-oriented participation may coincide with a temporary reluctance to advocate for the destination. These results indicate that participatory behaviors do not translate uniformly into destination brand advocacy and reinforce the importance of distinguishing emotional attachment from advocacy-oriented outcomes in destination branding research. In addition, empowerment experience shows a significant positive influence on both destination brand love and destination brand evangelism, suggesting that tourists who perceive greater autonomy and participation are more inclined to advocate for the destination. Perceived authenticity also demonstrates a positive but weaker direct effect on brand evangelism, indicating that authentic experiences primarily strengthen emotional attachment that subsequently encourages advocacy behavior.