Study On The Brand Mechanism And Strategies Of Geographical Indication Product

Under the condition of market economy, consumers have the right to choose their favorite freely, and the agricultural products enter the era of brand competition. China is abundant in geographical indication resources, and the brand building of geographical indication products is an important part of China's agricultural brand strategy which contributes greatly to China's agricultural development, farmers' income, regional brand and the regional economic development. In a word, the brand building of geographical indication products has important economic and social significance. However, the geographical indication can not be directly converted into the market success, and there are many problems in Geographical Indications industry, such as production shrinkage, abandonment, fabrication, brand risk, difficulty in the regulation. To gain market success, geographical indication products must overcome these problems. Although the existing research has discussed these problems, why and how to solute the problems is still required to further study from economic perspective. The unresolved problems are:Why some geographical indication products can get market successes while others fail? What are the conditions for sustainable development of the geographical indication (GI) products? The problems that exist in the geographical indication industry are all connected with brand construction, and it is necessary to study the brand mechanism and the strategy of GI products from the perspective of brand economics.In the framework of choice cost analysis paradigm, this paper starts the research from the analysis of the influence and restrict of consumer choice behavior of GI products to examine the real-world problems. The essence of problems and contradictions existing in GI industry is the conflicts of trademarks and brands, and can be grouped into the following three contradictions:contradictions between having a GI trademark and lacking a brand, contradictions between origin protection and profit growth, contradictions between scale brand economy of and public brands'risk, each corresponding the brand economy research area:brand construction, brand extension, brand management, say, the branding mechanism of geographical indications. This paper focuses on the contradictions above, and intends to solve the bottleneck problems of the GI industry and provide the theoretical guidance of brand building. This paper contains three parts. The first part consists of an introduction and document review which raises the problems on the basis of examination, and provides a reference for this study by finding the core and the inadequacies of present research. The second part consists of Chapter â…¢ to Chapter â…¦. Chapter â…¢ first analyzes the properties of the geographical indication system and reveals the inherent defects and the need for brand building of geographical indication system, so as to lay a foundation for studying branding mechanism. Chapter â…£ studies brand-building mechanism though GI products' consumer behavior, to study the reality of "having GI trademark but not having a brand". Chapter â…¤ focus on the analysis of co-mechanism and strategy in brand spread, and studies the use of dual-brand strategies in reality. Chapter â…¥ studies the brand extension mechanism and the strategies of GI products, to discuss the restrictions of the GI product output. Chapter â…¦ analyses the institutional basis of GI brand, such as the contradictions between decentralized production and market-orientation, public supervision of the brand. The third part is the summary and outlook of the research.Economic analysis of the GI system. This part analyzes the properties of the geographical indication system to reveal the inherent characteristics of geographical indication system, such as:the origin attribute of GI products, quality signal of the GI certification, the public property of GI, consumer awareness features of GI concept. Through analyzing the system characteristics to reveal:the generation and evolution process of the geographical indication system, the reasons and conditions for a premium of geographical indications, loss of efficiency brought by the inherent public property characteristics of the geographical indication system, the inherent flaws in the identification system of geographical indications system.Consumers' behavior analysis of GI Products. This part includes theoretical research and empirical research, and theoretical studies focus on three important issues. Firstly, as products of non-necessities of life, how can GI products get consumers' stable choice? This chapter studies two types of uncertainty:the uncertainty of the consumers' goods category demand and the uncertainty in the consumers' purchase process. Secondly, the mechanism of GI brands' influence on consumers' choice. This part mainly analyzes the mechanism of GI's reducing the selection cost. Thirdly, it is about how to find the best interest point of the GI brand. This chapter will map the characteristics of origin and GI products to study how geographical indications establish the link between the interests of consumers and product features, and provide theoretical guidance for finding the best single interest point of the GI, and study how to build the link between the interests of consumers and the product features, getting it to be a single interest point representatives of the consumers.Mechanism and Strategies analysis of brand spread in co-brand GI products. This part studies the co-branding mechanism and effect, and analyzes two specific GI products' co-branding strategies:the dual-brand strategy and the celebrity endorsement strategy. From the perspective of Brand Economics, it probes into the effecting mechanism, the co-branding enhancing the sale scale and the price, and the GI success conditions.Analysis on brand extension mechanism and strategies of GI products. GI products output constraints the product chain scale and the pulling influence on the regional economic growth though GI can promotes products' popularity and price. This chapter proves that brand extension strategies can explore the profit space, which in turn can break through the output restriction and get sustainable profit growth.Analysis on the institutional basis of GI brand. This chapter focuses on the institutional basis of geographical indication products, discusses the following questions in the framework of the choice cost of brand economics. First, under the conditions of decentralized production of agricultural products, through what forms of marketing and brand strategy to can GI gain market success? Secondly, how can enterprises in industry clusters set up mutual monitoring mechanism to limit and eliminate moral hazards such as "fraud" within the group.(1) A single-brand strategy to reduce the cost of consumer choice, increase product demand in origin, attain the economies of scale, reduce the cost, improve the efficiency in brand building. Under the conditions of decentralized production, market success can be achieved through the use of a single brand, a unified sale model. The role of rural cooperatives and cooperative organizations not only reduce market transaction costs, but also take the right brand strategy, building unified brands, thus reducing the cost of consumer choice.(2) Enterprises in Geographical Indication industry clusters, due to sharing joint geographical indication brands, can form the tight brand association, fulfill the internal self-discipline, and limit and eliminate such moral hazard as "false" on condition that they are fully aware of the brand coupling mechanism and exert the industry association system effectively.The main contributions of this dissertation are:(1) Through economic analysis of the defects inherent in the identification system to reveal and analyze the process of generation and evolution of geographical indications system, causes and conditions of the premium brought by the geographical indications and the inherent defects in it. The study has set up geographical indications' quality signaling model, the geographical indications' public brand model, and made the mapping analysis of identification system and legal connotations of geographical indications.(2) In-depth study of the consumer behavior of the geographical indication products:First, how to get a stable consumer choice as the product of non-necessities of life? Second, the mechanism of geographical indication brands' influence on consumers' choice and, Third, how to find the best interest point of GI. In the study, the category of non-essential agricultural production demand model and instantaneous purchase model are established, and the mapping model on the feature from origin to consumer demand is also employed in the analyzing the interest points.(3) Enrichment of the existing theory of brand economics. Co-branding and brand extension models are established in theoretical framework of selection costs. Brand communication theory and brand extension theory are further explored and applied to supplying corresponding strategy for GI products.(4)Analysis of the institutional basis of geographical indication products. In the framework of the selection cost theory of the brand economics, it has discussed such questions as the following:First, under the conditions of decentralized production of agricultural products, through what forms of marketing and brand strategy to can GI gain market success? Secondly, how can enterprises in industry clusters set up mutual monitoring mechanism to limit and eliminate moral hazards such as "fraud" within the group. The research has put forward the concept of category internal selection costs and established a monitoring game model and a GI brand association model.