Assessing managerial methods for evaluating place brand equity: A qualitative investigation

•DMO managers are using proxies to evaluate consumer-based brand equity.•Managers are not linking proxies directly to brand equity.•Absorptive capacity lets managers link what they evaluate to brand equity.

How DMO managers should evaluate success is a topic of much scholarly debate. Increasingly, there is a suggestion to integrate brand equity into place branding scholarship and practice, so this study aims to understand how DMO managers are using the construct, if at all. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 managers in a Southern U.S. state, and our results suggest that managers do not directly use consumer-based brand equity scales and instead use proxy measures that parallel with brand equity's components. We labeled these proxies revenue, web and social media analytics, benchmarking, and visibility. Problematically, managers do not link these proxies to mechanisms for creating brand equity. We suggest incorporating absorptive capacity as a way forward for managers to better link knowledge gathered with brand equity.