Spiritual Marketing in Tourism: Destination Image Based on Place Attachment and Emotional Solidarity with Residents

Considering the competition of tourist destinations in order to attract tourists and influence their decisions and selections, addressing the issue of destination image and the factors affecting its strengthening are of the necessities of tourism marketing. In this regard, one of the new strategies is to use spiritual marketing. Since spiritual marketing is about people's moods and emotions, there are several strategies for implementing it, each of which focuses on one or more spiritual variables that target people's emotions. Since part of the physical and mental peace and excellence that traveling brings to the tourists is related to human relationships with the Creator and other human beings (Sabaghpour Azarian et al., 2019), two of the spiritual variables that seem to play a role in the formation and strengthening of the destination image are place attachment and emotional solidarity with residents. Therefore, due to the weakness of the research background, the aim of this study was to identify the relationships between place attachment, emotional solidarity with residents, and finally cognitive, emotional, and conative destination image so as to increase knowledge in this field and provide solutions to improve the destination image.

      Due to the existence of many choices as tourist destinations, the use of marketing strategies in order to find an effective position in the tourist's mind is very important for tourist destinations. These strategies should be in a way that shows the destination in the customer's mind different from competitors. Achieving this goal can be achieved by creating an attractive image of the destination in the tourist's mind. The image of the destination is the concept that is formed in the tourist's mind about a place. In other words, the image of the destination includes two general aspects; One is mental and the other is behavioral. The mental aspect of the self includes two cognitive and emotional dimensions. The cognitive image of the destination refers to knowledge and beliefs about a destination. The emotional image is related to the feeling that the tourist has of a tourist destination, and finally, the behavioral aspect of the destination image, is known as the action image. It refers to the reflection of the destination image in the tourist's behavior. In this research, the image of the destination has been examined in three cognitive, emotional and action dimensions.
 

This was an applied research. Its conceptual model was obtained by developing the model of Woosnam et al. (2020). The relationship between the variables was investigated by using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach to Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). An adapted questionnaire was used to collect the relevant data. Its face and content validity was reviewed and approved by the experts. The statistical population consisted of the tourists in ecotourism tours to Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province. According to the applied technique, the minimum sample required for this study was estimated to include 90 people. However, 111 questionnaires were distributed in the statistical population, of which 100 valid questionnaires were returned and used in the analysis of the results. For sampling, first, a number of ecotourism service providers in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province was selected by the available method and then, the research questionnaire was randomly distributed among the tourists in the list of each service provider.

The findings showed that emotional solidarity with residents had the most direct relationship with place attachment, emotional image, and cognitive image, respectively. Also, emotional image was found to indirectly influence the conative destination image through place attachment. Moreover, place attachment had the most direct relationship with the emotional image of destination, cognitive image, and conative image, respectively.
 

According to the research findings, it could be concluded that increasing emotional solidarity with residents had an effect on increasing place attachment and improving the cognitive, emotional, and conative destination image. In a general summary, the present study tried to emphasize the importance of changing marketers’ views to pay attention to spiritual marketing strategies. Nevertheless, for such reasons as time constraint, this research only examined the effectiveness of two of the mentioned variables in ameliorating the destination image. This was one of the research limitations. It is recommended that other variables, as well as the moderating effects of demographic variables, be assessed for future research.