Theseries of opinions, believes, judgments and individual impressions represented asvisuals or pictures by a person towards a place or a product is the concept ofimage (Gibson, Zhang & Qi, 2008). The country image became an essentialtopic for researchers since 1960 and these studies aimed to understand theimage of the country and its effect on the product perception and therefore onthe plan to visit and finally the buying intention (Xu, Leung, Zhang & Cai,2015). It’s the sum of ideas that people usually associate to a specificcountry (Fereira Lopes, 2011).

Not only are the products of a countryinfluenced by the country’s image but also the touristic destinations,attractions and sites within that country (Giraldi, Ikeda and Campomar, 2011). Theperception of a country by touristic consumers is affected the marketing strengthsand weaknesses: the concept of country’s image is also identified as amarketing concept which its main goal is to study and collect the consumer’sdifference when it comes to their attitude toward a country or a destination(Jenes and Malota, 2009). Beforevisiting a destination, the image of that destination is perceived and this is identifiedas the primary image whereas the secondary image is the image assimilated for adestination after the travel period: this relation is influenced by severalimportant internal and external factors in each country and presented in thefigure 1 (Martin and Beerli, 2004).  TheCountry image is formed by three main elements: Cognition, affection andconation.

Thecognitive element is the summary of all the beliefs that can be politically,economically or socially oriented concerning a country as destination; thesebeliefs have a direct influence on a touristic consumer’s behavior towards theproducts and services of this country (Carter and Maher, 2011). The secondelement is the affection and it’s as important as the cognitive element as ithas a mediate influence on the intention of purchasing for a consumer (Carterand Maher, 2011): it represents the emotional and sensational reactions fortouristic consumers towards a specified country. Finally, the third element isthe conative element and it the result of a merge between the cognitive and theaffective elements: the outcome of both elements is designed as conativeelement and represents the intention to visit a destination over another(Marchiori and Onder, 2014).