How Do Destinations Relate to One Another? A Study of Destination Visual Branding on Instagram

Destination marketers are aware that online communication about their destination is increasingly dependent on visual media rather than text, due to the growing popularity of social networks such as Instagram. An accurate understanding of how the destination is being presented to users in this medium is critical for digital marketing activities, e.g. to know if the desired destination brand is present or if visitors focus on other aspects of the destination than those being promoted in marketing. Unlike text mining, which has well established techniques to extract keywords and associations from text corpora, a consistent approach to understanding the content of images and expressing the resulting destination brand is lacking. This paper presents a visual classifier trained and fine-tuned specifically for destination brand measurement from images using 18 visual classes. It presents an exploratory study of how different destinations are being presented visually on Instagram and discusses how these insights could be used by destination marketers to adapt and improve their digital marketing.