Medical tourism brand equity in emerging markets: scale development and empirical validation

Purpose This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences. Design/methodology/approach In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification. Findings The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as "brand awareness", "brand association", "perceived quality" and "loyalty", along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. "Infrastructure" has emerged as a new scale construct and "culture" was found to be a moderating variable for "perceived quality" in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature. Originality/value The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.