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1. Introduction
Over the past three decades, branding has assumed great significance in hotel marketing strategy (O’Neill and Mattila, 2010). Hotel branding is based on the notion that the brand adds value to both guests and hotels and cultivates brand loyalty (O’Neill and Xiao, 2006). Organizations operating within the hotel industry observed that brand identification and differentiation could be achieved through brand development (Prasad and Dev, 2000). Forgacs (2003), on the basis of his observation of various performance indicators, namely, level of occupancy, average price, revenue per available customer, revenue per available room and return on investment, suggested that branded hotels performed better as compared to non-branded ones. However, while the significance of branding has been widely acknowledged by academics and practitioners alike, branding in context of hotel industry has received comparatively less research attention (Kayaman and Arasli, 2007; So and King, 2010).
The increase in competition has forced hoteliers to look for new ways to differentiate their brand from competitor brands (Bailey and Ball, 2006; Kim, 2008). Yesawich (1996) indicated that visitors attached importance to brand while selecting a hotel. Effective brand management strategies require creation of symbolic, emotional and intangible differences to create memorable hotel brand experiences which might in turn induce guest loyalty – an essence of brand building (Cai and Hobson, 2004; So and King, 2010). This implies that hotels must strive to create best possible experiences for customers at every point of interaction through effective marketing strategies (Gilmore and Pine, 2002; Miao and Mattila, 2013; Rahman, 2014).
Through a series of studies, Brakus et al. (2009) developed a brand experience scale for a wide variety of brands (both goods and service brands). However, his study considered few hotel brands. A hotel brand is distinguished from other brands on the basis of the context in which a visitor experiences the hotel offering (Walls, 2013). In the absence of a scale that measures experiences of visitors evoked by hotel brand-related stimuli, hoteliers have had to rely on the general brand experience scale which may not be a very accurate measure of brand experience in context of the hotel industry. Brand experience in the hotel industry differs from general brand experience in terms of face-to-face interaction and information exchange, short distribution channel,...