Chinese city brands and semiotic image scales: a tourism perspective

While many researchers have documented the characteristics of China's growing tourism market, a comprehensive image scale of city brand for tourism has not yet been developed. This study investigates a semiotic image scale of city brands to encapsulate the contextual background of China and its ability to increase tourism efforts. This study attempts to extend the semiotic mapping of consumption values to city brand and develop it into an image scale of city brand in the perspective of tourism practitioners. In the process of developing an image scale for understanding the perception of the consumer's city brands, this study utilizes semiotic mapping of consumption values to analyse the consumer's image vocabulary. The image vocabularies are categorized into four quadrants (mission, project, euphoria, and information) as illustrated in the semiotic mapping of consumption values. In the Chinese context, the developed image scale extracts the value orientations of excellence, effectiveness, pleasantness, and convenience with these four quadrants to comprehend city brand in tourism perspective. By combining the measurement development with the reality of city tourism in China, the image scale will help to systematically understand the city brand image expressed through tourism in China.