Personalidade de marca do destino Natal sob a ótica dos guias de turismo

Abstract

Tourism is a complex activity whose commercial approach encourages destinations to invest in different strategies in order to stand out from the competitive market. One of these strategies is the formulation of destination brands, which communicate directly with the local tourist public. The branding manages to create a deeper relationship with tourists by humanasing the destination. In this way, tourists visualise the place they are visiting with emotions, personalities and other characteristics attributed to people. As these tourists often turn to tourist guides to define their experience at the destination, the aim of this dissertation is to: Understand how tourist guides perceive the tourist brand of the destination Natal, based on the Brand Personality Scale. This method analyses the destination's brand based on 42 variables divided into 5 dimensions. The quantitative data was analysed using SPSS software. The analyses were validated using Cronbach's Alpha. The results show that tourist guides see the city as sincere, family-orientated, healthy, cheerful, cool, charming and friendly. The main audience for the guides are families from nearby towns, which may explain this positioning. However, when it comes to the Brand specifically, similarities are pointed out between ‘Viva Natal’ and other successful brands, leading to questions about the ‘touristification’ of the destination, i.e. the creation of experiences, and in this case, brands, which make little use of the local identity, being similar to other cases. To deepen the discussion, future studies suggest reapplying the method with tourists, preferably with a larger sample.