Tourist destinations can be considered products (Boo, Busser, & Baloglu, 2009; Yoon & Uysal, 2005) that destination marketing organizations (DMOs) must adequately manage to attract visitors and build loyalty. To that end, in a global and competitive environment such as the current one, having a strong brand is a good strategy for achieving positive returns, providing the differentiation needed from competitor destinations and gaining competitive advantage (Hanna & Rowley, 2007; Pike, 2009). ‘Place branding’ is the application of product branding to places (Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2006). Despite the interest it has garnered, place branding is a relatively new research area (Cai, 2002) that is still considered to be in its infancy (Konecnik, 2006; Pike, Bianchi, & Kerr, 2010). Until now, the literature available has been greatly fragmented (Gertner, 2011), and concepts such as ‘brand loyalty’, ‘brand equity ‘, ‘ brand architecture’, which have an extensive background in the marketing literature (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000; Aaker 1996; Keller, 1993), have rarely been explored in the field of tourism (Dooley & Bowie, 2005; Harish, 2010; Pike, 2007; Konecnik, 2006).

Kavaratzis and Ashworth (2006) question whether city branding is a transitory marketing trick. Furthermore, they question if place branding may be impossible because places are not exactly products, and governments and users are not producers and consumers respectively. Their conclusion is that place branding ‘is not only possible but that it is, and has been, practiced consciously or unconsciously for as long as cities have competed with each other for trade, populations, wealth, prestige or power’ (Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2006, p. 188). With regard to this, Hankinson (2001) reviewed the practices of branding in 12 English cities and concluded that marketing tools were widely applied to places but also tended to be little understood. This calls for the creation of an integrated framework that clarifies all of the aspects of developing a place brand and gives guidance for managing it (Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2006).

Place branding is based on the conceptual domains of tourism and urban policy. However, since 2000 there has been a growing contribution to the place branding literature from service marketing studies and, above all, corporate branding studies. The theoretical developments of both research lines have led to a richer and more useful theory of place branding (Hankinson 2009, 2010). In this regard, ‘brand identity’, ‘brand architecture’ or ‘brand equity’, among others, become interesting research fields. In the case of ‘brand equity’, Pike (2009) identifies this concept as a potential research gap, suggesting that further research in this area might usefully be extended to the measurement of re-branding and re-positioning strategies. Studies about destination brand equity are, however, scarce and are supported mainly in past research on destination image. Additionally, more diversified quantitative methods are required to successfully identify the elements and dimensions of brand equity (Chan & Marafa, 2013).