The Korea Destination Brand Equity Model, developed by Yanolja Research, provides a systematic framework to evaluate how international tourists perceive and emotionally respond to Korea as a travel destination. Unlike traditional visitor count metrics, this model offers a more nuanced, data-driven approach to measuring brand strength.

1. Purpose

• To measure qualitative brand strength beyond the number of inbound tourists

• To regularly track brand perception by country, city, and category

• To build a practical, decision-oriented brand equity model for use in tourism policy and marketing

2. Evaluation Framework

The model evaluates five core dimensions of Korea's destination brand equity:

• 1. Brand Awareness
  2. Buzz

  3. Brand Familiarity with overall Korea tourism and major interest cities

     - Recall vs. recognition not distinguished; focus on overall awareness

     - Recall vs. recognition not distinguished; focus on overall awareness

  4. Total
     City
• 1. Brand Image
  2. PosBuzz Ratio

  3. Degree of positive or negative sentiment toward “Korea tourism”

     - Brand image defined as emotional response (per KTO), not dimensionally divided

  4. Total
• 1. Brand Association
  2. Buzz

  3. Level of association across detailed dimension of “Korea tourism”

     - Fundamental Components: Recategorized based on travel-related associations (KOFICE, KTO)

  4. Fundamental Components

     K-Content

     Nature

     K-Food

     Shopping

     Leisure
     Entertainment

     K-Beauty

     History Tradition

• 1. Brand Quality
  2. PosBuzz Ratio

  3. Evaluation of quality across detailed dimensions of “Korea tourism”

     - Fundamental Components : same as left

     - Enabling Environment : 5 sub-dimensions based on Dedeoglu et al. (2020)

  4. Fundamental
     Components

     Same as left

     Enabling
     Environment

     Prices

     Safety
     /Hygiene

     Transportation

     Language
     /Translation

• 1. Brand Loyalty
  2. PosBuzz Ratio

  3. Degree of intention to recommend Korea as a travel destination

     - Brand Loyalty : Focused on recommendation, not revisit(due to global/SNS context)

  4. Recommendation

3. Data Collection

• User-Generated Content (UGC) from social platforms in collaboration with Dxentric & Brandwatch

• Over 100 million posts filtered for Korea-related travel context

• Top 10 source markets analyzed (e.g., Japan, China, U.S., Taiwan, South East Asia)

• Data sources:

• SNS: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter)

• Others: blogs, forums, online reviews, news

• Collection period: Annually

4. Measurement Logic

• Buzz volume: measures brand awareness and association

• Positive word ratio (PosBuzz): measures image, quality, and loyalty

• Quality and association are further broken down into:

• 7 Fundamental Components (K-Content, K-Food, Leisure-Entertainment, History-Tradition, Nature, Shopping, K-Beauty)

• 5 Enabling Environment Factors (Prices, Safety-Hygiene, Accommodation, Transportation, Language-Translation)

• Scores are comparable by year, country, and city