Measuring the economic effectiveness of place advertising in China

The empirical evidence for the effectiveness of place communication has not been extensively investigated. Our study aims to answer the basic inquiry as to whether a significant and sustained communication effort will generate a measurable economic impact on the target location. The results indicate that there is a significant positive correlation at P value 0.01 level between place advertising and tourist expenditure (0.226) based on the data of place brand advertising campaigns of 31 provinces in China within the time period of 2005 to 2015. Further, this study suggests that the level of advertising has a clear impact on tourist expenditure: each 1% of additional advertising can generate a 0.013% increase in tourist expenditure at the P <0.05 level. The findings from this study also support the extant studies on influencing factors upon tourist expenditure: namely tourism resources (0.394), transportation capacity (0.564), and per capital dispensable income (0.721). The economic effectiveness of place branding within China cannot be given more granularity at this stage beyond the overall model and correlations we have found. The more detailed process that tourist undertakes when considering a visit is fluid and may follow many paths.