This article evaluates the contribution of commonly used symbolic elements – namely destination name, logo and tagline – to the establishment of the destination brand. The conceptual framework is developed combining suggestions on the role and significance of symbolic brand elements for commercial brands with the literature on destination and place branding, drawing particularly on the recent identity-based approach to place brands. The article reports on field research that operationalized the theoretical framework to examine the perceptions of visitors to Greece. Although the name is clearly more influential, the overall contribution of the symbolic elements to the brand is proven to be limited. This implies that destinations need to prioritise other aspects of the branding effort.

Introduction

Places, regardless of scale (country, city or smaller place) or perspective adopted (solely as a tourism destination or a wider perspective), are extremely complex in nature (e.g. Creswell, 2004). Thus, any discussion of branding application to places is also very complex and needs to go beyond theories of product or corporate branding (e.g. Ooi & Stoeber, 2010). The import of approaches, terminologies and methods from the commercial world to the world of place development is not straightforward (Braun, 2012; Mabey & Freeman, 2012). This explains why place branding has been approached from a variety of perspectives and with different aims and intentions. While it is not the aim of this paper to classify all these approaches, four different perspectives can be distinguished, each of them creating rather autonomous theory and principles. These perspectives are the country-of-origin approach (e.g. Papadopoulos & Heslop, 2002), focusing on the role of the place in product branding; the destination-branding approach (e.g. Morgan, Pritchard, & Pride, 2002), primarily focusing on the tourism function and attracting visitors; the public- diplomacy approach (e.g. Sevin, 2013), examining the relationships between the place’s authorities and external stakeholders in order to enhance the place’s reputation; and the identity–based approach (e.g. Kavaratzis & Hatch, 2013), focusing on interactions between internal and external audiences and how individuals attribute meaning to place brands. These trends are, of course, inter-related and have considerable commonalities: something that is again a result of the inherently multifaceted nature of places. While the trends are better examined in conjunction to each other, the most significant conceptual developments occur within the identity-based perspective, which therefore serves as the departure point for this study. This study aims to contribute to a broader understanding of both the identity-based and the destination branding approaches by focusing on an important aspect of the destination-branding effort: namely the role and significance of symbolic brand elements: brand name, logo and slogan (or tagline). The main issues the paper is attempting to clarify are whether and, if so, to what extent the brand’s symbolic elements contribute to the place brand as a whole. This is an issue that remains unexplored in the literature. Indeed Pike (2016) identifies the lack of understanding of the effectiveness of slogans and logos as one of the main research gaps in the destination branding literature. The motivation behind the study and the intended contribution of this article is to provide a better understanding of the significance that visitors attribute to these elements in the formation and evaluation of the destination brand. This issue is examined through a preliminary study undertaken among visitors to Greece, the intention being to validate the findings with an in-depth study across a range of destination brands in the near future.