Investigating the Role of the Brand in the Sustainable Development of Tourism (Case Study: Shahroud City)

Tourism is a leading industry in the world that while developing a lot, has a great impact on countries and paying attention to its development criteria can improve the situation of tourism destinations, meanwhile branding plays a vital role for tourism growth.  Tourism destination branding includes a set of activities and programs that give nature to the tourism destination and differentiate it and strengthen the emotional connection between the tourist and the tourist destination. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of tourism criteria from the perspective of citizens and to determine the tourism brand of Shahroud from the perspective of elites; The present research is of applied type and in terms of nature and method is descriptive-analytical. Data collection is by documentary and survey methods with a statistical population of 30 people as a sample of tourism experts that after review, criteria in four dimensions of physical, economic and infrastructure symbols, cultural and social perspective and selection and weighting of indicators based on AHP done. In the other part, a researcher-made questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha of 0.893 and a statistical sample of 384 people based on the Cochran's formula, the effectiveness of tourism criteria according to people's opinion was analyzed with SPSS software.  The research area of Shahroud city is with an area of 51419 square kilometers. The research findings show that tourism in Shahroud is not in a good condition and is not at an acceptable level. Welfare and accommodation places were selected as Shahroud tourism brand.