The 21st century is the global competition era as the world is integrated into the one. Not only does the global competition run deeper than the past, but transportation and communication system are developed rapidly. Inter vs intra cities' fierce int...
The 21st century is the global competition era as the world is integrated into the one. Not only does the global competition run deeper than the past, but transportation and communication system are developed rapidly. Inter vs intra cities' fierce international competition has been also keener than before. The status of global market competition has been changing from the price competition aspect to the non-price competition (structural) aspect. According to the prior researches, it is said that country image has affected the consumer's evaluation on the product and the country competitiveness.
The private sector (business entities) and the public sector (government) concentrate their energy on these results and give huge amounts of attention. The sphere of this research not only covers the marketing discipline, but expends geography, tourism study, and mass communication study.
The importance of country image increases daily as the intra governments competition becomes fierce and snarling. In the time of 21st century regional government, importance of the city image increases everyday to bring the scale of capital and attract inhabitants and tourists into the city.
Nowadays the regional governments in this country have gone through a lot of changes not only internally and externally but also domestically and aborad. Positively they have adopted place marketing strategy to survive and continually have had prosperity by enhancing the city image.
However, most researches, which were related to the city image that was dealt with a place, guide only general direction or outline the general level. There has been few actual study and model building to decide the city image. Therefore, this study has the objective to test empirically the determinants factor to the city image and verifies agreement to the model. To reach the research objective, after reviewing the components factors which are consisted of country and city image which have place as an object, the researcher obtained four factors as is, the city opening(open-door policy) factor, the city modernization factor, the city identity factor and the city stability factor through the FGI(focus group interview).
This paper established research hypotheses and model on the above 4 factor ground. To verify this, the researcher developed questionnaire and collected the data. The researcher did exploratory factor analysis to know what all 25 items were.
The following was the result;
3 city opening(open-door policy) factors consisted of an acceptance of opinion, favorable relationship, and settlement environment.
3 city modernization factors consisted of education level, product quality level, and service.
3 city identity factors consisted of nature environment, history preservation, and entertainment factor.
3 city stability factors consisted of security level, employee-employer relationship, and political environment.
The coefficient among each variable is less than 0.6 respectively. It represents that there is no multi-collinearity. In addition, the researcher tested reliability and validity. The goodness of fit of the model and hypothesis were tested by analyzing structural equation model.
The summary of this empirical study results was as follows:
First, it represented that the city image were influenced overall by the city opening(open-door policy) factor, the city modernization factor, the city identity factor, and the city stability factor.
Second, according to research model analysis, the value of path coefficient of standardized research model was turned out as significant level. Therefore, the goodness of fit of model and hypothesis 1, 2, 3, 4 all were supported.
The value of this study was as follows:
First, prior papers which were related to the city image just reached to the outline level or the case study level. But this study tried to get scientific approaches to the research by testing the goodness of fit of model by empirical analysis.
Second, this study showed the components of each factor to decide the city image. Therefore, this study provided people with the theoretical ground of the advertising strategy for improving regional government image as well as especially with invaluable viewpoint for the establishment of the region identity.