Abstract

A lot of destinations attempt to encourage their tourism industry more prosperous by the strategy of branding due to the increasingly fierce competition among the global tourism market. While, the final success will only belong to those destinations who hawe great competitive advantage achieved by well established brand equity. The most common measures used as branding strategy is to design a slogan and a logo for destinations themselves, and the effect of this kind of measures has been a widely discussed topic in academia and industry. More recently, celebrity endorsement becomes an alternative for many destinations to market themselves as a brand, but the possibility cannot be ruled out that many destinations are just wanting to attract the eyeballs of the audiences without understanding whether or how the celebrity endorsement can be helpful to the destination brand equity. The implementation of branding is very hard for destinations due to the complexity of the destination product itself. So, it should de given the priority to think about what effect the very limited number of existing strategies have for destination branding. Discussing the role of celebrity endorsement for destination branding in the early time is significant both for exploring the antecedent variable of destination brand equity and assessing the effect of celebrity endorsement strategy by using destination brand equity as the index.

For the purpose mentioned above, this study carried out several works as follow:Firstly, the literature review comprises the analysis of celebrity endorsement effect, brand equity and brand credibility in common marketing field and the destina tion celebrity endorsement, destination brand equity in tourism study. The literatures inspired the author to analyze the effect of celebrity endorsement on destination brand equity from a perspective of celebrity credibility and provide a rich foundation for the hypotheses.

Secondly, an exploratory factor analysis（EFA）is used to identify the basic dimensions of celebrity credibility. Five dimensions, including celebrity-destination relevance, celebrity achievement, celebrity awareness, celebrity ethics and celebrity attractiveness are extracted. These five dimensions is a foundation based on which the effect of celebrity credibility on destination brand equity will be analyzed.

Thirdly, a path of“celebrity credibility→destination brand credibility→destination brand equity”is put forward based on the conclusions of existing literatures and some related theories. And travelers' venturesomeness personality is hypothesized to have the moderating role between the path relationship of celebrity credibility and destination brand credibility. Depending on the research ideas above, a conceptual model is constructed, then all the hypotheses are put forward at the dimension level.

Fourthly, all hypotheses are tested using s series of mathematical statistics such as structural equation modeling. The findings show that:1. Celebrity-destination relevance, celebrity achievement and celebrity ethics have significant positive impact on the two dimensions（expertise and trustworthiness）of destination brand credibility;while the impact of celebrity awareness and celebrity attractiveness on the two dimensions（expertise and trustworthiness）of destination brand credibility is not significant. 2. The two dimensions（expertise and trustworthiness）of destination brand credibility have significant positive impact on the three dimensions including brand awareness, brand image and perceived quality except brand loyalty of destination brand equity. 3. Destination brand awareness has significant positive impact on destination brand image, destination perceived quality and destination brand loyalty; destination brand image has significant positive impact on destination perceived quality and destination brand loyalty; destination perceived quality has significant positive impact on destination brand loyalty. 4. Travelers' venturesomeness personality has moderating effect on the path between three dimensions（celebrity achievement, celebrity awareness and celebrity ethics）of celebrity credibility and two dimensions（expertise and trustworthiness）of destination brand credibility; and this moderating effect only occur between celebrity attractiveness and the trustworthiness dimension of destination brand credibility.5. The results of independent-samples T test imply that the samples'perceptions of the two dimension of destination brand credibility and the four dimensions of destination brand equity is significantly better under having endorser scenario than noendorser scenario. The author also gives some explanation for the results.

Through the above research, this study achieves several innovations in comparison with previous studies:1. Exploring the basic dimensions of celebrity credibility in destination situation.2. Analyzing the influence mechanism between celebrity credibility and destination brand equity empirically. 3. It is the first study to test the moderating effect of travelers' venturesomeness personality between celebrity endorsement and the tourists' appraisal about destination brand.

At last, several proposals are given for application of the celebrity endorsement strategy, and some limitations of current study and prospects for future studies are also discussed at the end of this study.

Key Words:celebrity credibility; destination brand equity；

destination brand credibility