Destination brand personality is a rather new approach taken by many academic and empirical researches. Destination brand personality became an important structure to understand a tourist’s choice process, and a way of differentiating destinations and enhancing their competitiveness. | 144 | Phạm Thị Lan Hương & Nguyễn Minh Huy | 144 - 160 A Study of Destination Brand Personality for Đà Nẵng Tourism PHẠM THỊ LAN HƯƠNG University of Đà Nẵng - phamlanhuong2008@ NGUYỄN MINH HUY University of Đà Nẵng - huynguyenkt2160@ ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received: June 14 2013 Received in revised form May 05 2014 Accepted: June 30 2014 Destination brand personality is a rather new approach taken by many academic and empirical researches. Destination brand personality became an important structure to understand a tourist’s choice process, and a way of differentiating destinations and enhancing their competitiveness. The research focuses on analyses of destination brand personalities of Đà Nẵng based on domestic tourists’ perception in order to identify dimensions and strengths of personalities associated with Đà Nẵng as a destination. The results show that destination brand personality can be identified through three dimensions: sincerity, excitement, and competence-charming, which consist of thirteen items. Among them, sincerity and excitement are two principal factors of destination personality, compliant with findings by most previous researches. The new factor for destination of Đà Nẵng is competence-charming. Keywords: brand personality, place brand, destination brand, destination brand personality, dimensions of destination brand personality, Đà Nẵng. JED July 2014| 145 1. INTRODUCTION Đà Nẵng has been known as an ideal site for tourism development in recent years. Building a strong destination brand is an important goal, therefore, one of effective means to achieve the goal is to identify and build destination brand personality as an important factor of destination image. A destination known as a person with its own human characteristics can have a different and unique impression in tourists’ minds compared to other competitors. It also raises interest, fondness, .
