Pride and promotion: Exploring relationships between national identification, destination advocacy, tourism ethnocentrism and destination image

Abstract

Social media sites are an increasingly popular forum for loyal and engaged destination advocates to promote a place and encourage visitation. Motivation to advocate is related to one's identity, belonging and involvement with a place, factors of particular relevance to residents. Borrowing from the field of social psychology, this study examines the role of national identification as a determinant of residents’ destination advocacy behaviour. Adapted to a tourism context, it measures relationships between identity and advocacy for the first time. Canadian residents (n = 465) were surveyed online through Destination Canada's Facebook page, revealing that the stronger one's national identification, the more likely one is to advocate for their nation. The relationship positively impacts destination image and tourism ethnocentrism, newly identified relationships that contribute to destination marketing theory and practice. Further, it is not destination image that influences an ethnocentric sense of duty to travel within one's boundary; it is national identification.