#ILoveLondon: An exploration of the declaration of love towards a destination on Instagram

Abstract

Travellers increasingly use a combination of photographs, texts and hashtags to expressing their attitude towards tourism destinations (TDs). Existing destination branding literature has not yet investigated how consumers express their love towards TDs on social media. This study addresses this knowledge gap and explores how destination brand love (DBL) is expressed on Instagram using a mixed-methods approach. Study one consists of a qualitative visual content analysis of 700 user-generated photographs; while study two adopts text analytics with a sample of 48,783 posts. The findings show Instagram users’ declaration of DBL is expressed through photographs of some destination attributes (natural & architectural, people, public transportation, food, weather), accompanied by specific positive emotions (amazement, attractiveness, pleasure, preference, enchantment, nostalgia, belongingness, intimacy). The findings also illustrate how Instagram users express their love by providing emotional support when the destination goes through a crisis and that different stakeholders co-create the emotional capital of TDs.

Introduction

Destination branding enables tourism marketers to create a unique and differential image of the destination by combining a place's environmental, social and cultural capital within the destination brand (Campelo, Aitken, Thyne, & Gnoth, 2014). By showcasing the features and characteristics that make a destination distinctive and attractive (Blain, Levy, & Ritchie, 2005), destination branding helps destination management organizations (DMOs) in marketing the destination's identity, not only to visitors but also to residents (Blain et al., 2005; Pike, 2005; Pike & Page, 2014).

Nevertheless, destination brand image is not created by DMOs alone. Social media users today contribute to the co-creation of destination image through posting stories and digital photographs narrating their experience with the destinations' offerings. Moreover, travellers increasingly communicate their feelings about destinations, accommodations, and restaurants through social media (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010; Lo, McKercher, Lo, Cheung, & Law, 2011; Mak, 2017). Assisted by hashtags and geolocation services, social photography becomes increasingly popular, making destination brand image the inevitable product of consumers' social media conversations (Fournier & Avery, 2011; Kim, Lee, Shin, & Yang, 2017; Kladou & Mavragani, 2015; Mak, 2017; Oliveira & Panyik, 2015). Often the urge to share is intensified after satisfactory visits or encounters with destination stimuli and as a result of their DBL. DBL denotes the self-identification and passionate emotional attachment that one has toward a destination (Aro, Suomi, & Saraniemi, 2018). Such digital photographs shared to express DBL are particularly influential, acting as positive word-of-mouth (Bergkvist & Bech-Larsen, 2010; Donaire, Camprubí, & Galí, 2014; Filieri, 2015; Wallace, Buil, & de Chernatony, 2014), and can easily influence actual and prospect tourists’ attitudes towards a destination (Kim & Stepchenkova, 2015; Lund, Cohen, & Scarles, 2017).

However, how images are deployed to express social media users' feeling towards a destination has only received scant research attention (Aro et al., 2018; Kladou & Mavragani, 2015; Oliveira & Panyik, 2015). Instead, extant research has focused on: the potential use of Instagram for destination branding purposes (Fatanti & Suyadnya, 2015), the socio-demographics of travellers who post travel-related pictures (Lo et al., 2011), the similarities and differences between visitors and residents' perceptions of a destination (Garrod, 2009), the differences between projected and travellers’ destination image (Mak, 2017; Stepchenkova & Zhan, 2013), the role of culture in destination image perception (Stepchenkova, Kim, & Kirilenko, 2015), and the effect of travel photographs in forming attitude and destination visit intention (Kim & Stepchenkova, 2015).

Some studies touched on travellers' relationship with tourism destinations, examining the emotional bonds between people and places (Pan, Lee, & Tsai, 2014; Cheng & Kuo, 2015). Scholars investigated travellers' love towards a destination (Aro et al., 2018; Lee & Hyun, 2016; Swanson, 2015, 2017). Nevertheless, they paid little attention to how social media users express their love towards a destination through image-sharing, and specifically on Instagram, overlooking the point that a brand's reality often lies in the experience of its consumers, through their passionate brand identification and engagement (Kohli, Yen, Alwi, & Gupta, 2020). This oversight might explain why many DMOs are struggling to differentiate their destinations from competitors (Aro et al., 2018; Stepchenkova & Zhan, 2013), as they fail to observe how consumers express or declare strong emotions towards a specific destination using digital photographs.

Furthermore, very few studies have explored DBL in crisis situation, such as, when a destination suffers a terrorist attack. Although crises are assumed to have negative effects on a destination's reputation, attractiveness, perceived safety, and intention to travel (Sönmez, Apostolopoulos, & Tarlow, 1999), tourists sometimes manifest forms of emotional solidarity towards residents (Woosnam & Aleshinloye, 2013). By exploring the declaration of love prior to and during a time of crisis, this study also contributes to research on tourists' emotional solidarity during a crisis (Woosnam & Aleshinloye, 2013).

To address these research gaps, this paper asks the following research questions: how do Instagram users express their love towards a destination brand in their posts? And more specifically, which destination attributes, emotions, and hashtags are adopted in the declaration of love towards a tourism destination? How do Instagram users declare their love before, during and after a crisis?

We chose Instagram and London as the research setting. Instagram is the leading image-sharing social media platform, with one billion monthly active users (Statista, 2020). London is one of the most popular tourism destinations and ranks the highest on the global power city index (ONS, 2020; UNWTO, 2019). Since we focus on exploring how DBL is expressed, we chose to explore the user-generated posts published under the destination love hashtag #iLoveLondon on Instagram, which hosts over 1 million posts (i.e. 1,277,359; January 2021, Instagram). Adopting an abductive mode of reasoning, we adopted a mixed-methods approach to gain a comprehensive understanding of the researched topic (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Combing a visual content analysis of 700 Instagram photographs and a text analysis of 48,783 posts’ text and hashtags, this study extends the depth and breadth of enquiry through method and data triangulation (Creswell & Miller, 2000; Torrance, 2012).

The study's findings can provide valuable insights to managers of destination management organizations (DMOs) and help them identify the destination attributes and the most appropriate hashtags used to express love towards a destination. As such, this paper extends previous understandings of DBL, by specifically illustrating how love is expressed through social image-sharing on Instagram and unravelling the emotional bond between people and places (Cheng & Kuo, 2015).