The effect of celebrity involvement on general country image and destination image

Abstract

BTS, one of the most famous K-pop boy bands, received their first Grammy nomination for Dynamite, which is their first song that topped Billboard Hot 100 chart. Korean wave, first introduced to East Asian countries by Korean soap operas in early 1990s, now is a worldwide phenomenon spreading not only into Asia but also into the US, South America, Europe, and Africa. Keeping up with the times, popular culture tourism has emerged as a growing body of research and numerous recent studies focused on Korean pop culture’s impact on tourism in various aspects. Studies have examined purposeful fan tourists’ celebrity involvement as an antecedent of behavioral intention, place attachment, and destination image implied that the level of celebrity involvement can influence the perceptions of a place related the celebrity. However, whenever foreign tourists assess the destination image of Korea, general country image is innately included. This study aims to investigate the relationship between celebrity involvement and destination image deeper in the way of adopting measures which could differentiate destination image from general country image. The main purposes of this study were: 1) to investigate the effect of celebrity involvement on general country image and destination image, and 2) to inspect the interrelationships among the affective components of general country image, the cognitive components of general country image and destination image. Through a bulk of literature review regarding Korean wave phenomenon, K-pop, pop culture tourism, celebrity involvement, general country image, and destination image, a theoretical model that incorporated the interrelationships among celebrity involvement, two components of general country image, and destination image was proposed. The data collected by online panel were used to test the model. To collect purposeful respondents, there were three screening criteria: 1) to be Japanese 2) living in Japan, and 3) to have more than one favorite K-pop artist. Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted by AMOS 23.0 to test hypotheses. The results showed that there was positive effect of celebrity involvement on both components of general country image. However, there was rather negative relationship between celebrity involvement and destination image directly. Whereas, being mediated by general country image, the total effect including indirect effect of celebrity involvement on destination image turned positive. The results also indicated that while the two components of general country image mediated between celebrity involvement and destination image, the affective component of general country image had bigger influence either way from celebrity involvement and to destination image compared to the cognitive component of it. The finding of this research demonstrates that in the country scale of tourism study, functional parts of the image as a tourism product are hardly affected directly by positive perception of celebrity. However, fans’ positive perception toward celebrity is indirectly transferred to the functional parts through representative and holistic parts of image especially with a larger role of affective side. Theologically, this study is meaningful that it distinguished general country image and destination image in the context of Hallyu tourism. The distinction made possible to understand deeper about the process how people’s positive perception generated by celebrity influence destination perception. Practically, this study helps marketers who promote country level of destination using Hallyu contents to gain more detailed understanding about purposeful Hallyu tourists’ destination image forming process. Marketers could obtain better destination perception by boosting affective side of general country image with repetitive exposure and familiarization.