Reimaging Ethiopia through Destination Branding

Abstract

As the name of a country is negatively seen due to certain unpleasant incidents, re-imaging is obviously important and Ethiopia is affected by early derogatory histories which force the modern readers and viewers conception to be shaped by stories of wars and natural disasters including famine crisis that highly affect the destination brands especially the re-imaging effort. On this regard, Ethiopia was analyzed from the context of the tourists and some concerned organization so as to identify the possibility of re-imaging the country by using destination branding practices. To meet the goal, the study used mixed research approach and samples of 368 respondents were selected randomly to fill the questionnaires and out of it, 316 of them were collected and analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics accordingly to test the hypothesis and reach the conclusions. The output reflects the destination marketing facts and insights in general, and recommendations are provided on how to re-image Ethiopia through destination branding which can be possible using branding techniques that could bring significant changes over stereotypes developed because of incidents that happen in the past.