ABSTRACT
Brand management is a topic of considerable interest for both academia and industry. Building and managing strong brands is considered to be one of the crucial tasks of brand managers for the success of any hospitality and tourism organization. Strong brands provide a series of benefits to service firms, such as greater customer loyalty and higher resiliency to endure crisis situations, higher profit margins, higher market value (O'Neil and Xiao, 2006), more favorable customer response to price change, and licensing and brand extension opportunities (Keller, 2001). Ries and Ries (1998, p. 2) argue that branding has possibly been one of the most critical marketing strategies that serve as ‘the glue that embraces the wide range of marketing functions collectively.’
