Empirical Research On Green Brand Development Mechanism

It is a competitive choice for an enterprise to implement green brand strategy in a surplus economy and sustainable development era. The current researches on green brand focus in providing enterprises with procedural green branding strategies from the point view of brand management and green marketing. This approach overlooks the essence of green branding and its institutional environment. Drawing on previous researches as references, the paper probes the development mechanism of green brands in food industry from the point view of the paradigm of choice cost of brand economics, taking the green certification institutional analysis as the emphasis, integrating the analyses of green brand consumption and green brand decision, and by ways of comprehensive utilization of economic analytical methods. The main aim of the paper is to improve the institutional environment of green brand development, and help more enterprise build competitive green brands.Green brand is a brand more environmentally friendly than traditional ones. Environmentally friendliness have characteristics of crudence property, and according to the paradigm of choice cost of brand economics, green brand is a tool to improve the blieveness and reduce the choice cost of green consumption. Perfect third-party green certification can improve the believability of green signal to green consumers, improve product's green brand categrility, and reduce the choice cost of green consumption. Effective green certification systems are the institutional base for green brand development, and a green brand is a brand with authoritative green third-party certification in practice and is a coalition of green certification club brand and certificated coporate brand. Game analysis shows that, a serious of collective action dilemmas from the club attribute of green certification defect the perfectness of third-party certification institution. The belivability of green certification signal is low, the promotion of green certification is short, and there is competition between different green certification schemes. All these factors lower the green brand categarility of the green certificated enterprise, increase green consumption choice cost, lower the effectiveness of green certification institution. Strengthening governmental regulation of green certification and building club brand and reputation of green certification body can help to improve the quality of green certification signal, establish a credible green certification scheme, fully play the incicative role of green brand and bridge green consumption and green production.Consumers'green brand consumption choice behavior analyis shows, green purchase and consumption is more likely a frequency propability behavior, and consumers'green product purchase frequency choice concept model is provided based on the analysis of factors influencing green product purchase frequency. A green consumption survey is conducted in some cities in Shandong Province, and the ordinal choice probit model is used to analyse the factors influencing green product purchase frequency, and the result shows that, the surveyee's income level, environmental protection action willingness, green product certification recognition-adoption ratio, green product quality evaluation and green product recommendation are the crucial factors influencing green product purchase frequency and consumption. Survey results also shows, the surveyees believe more in the third-party green certification than other green branding approaches and green certification plays a unique role for consumers in green purchaseing; the surveyees'awareness of green certification schemes are generally low and not evenly distributed, the promotion of certification schemes are deferent by their structure; the competition between different certification schemes confuses most of consumers and increases their choice cost. The paper believes that green consumption is an adaptive learning process, and consumers can learn to increase the frequency of purchase of green products. For enterprises, choosing and passing credible and authoritative green certification, and displaying it fully to consumers will help them to improve green brand categority and lower green purchase choice cost.Corporate green branding decision is also analyzed. Optimum decision models are established to delineate enterprise greenness choice. The models show that governmental regulation is the main force to drive ordinary enterprises to fulfil true greening strategy. As for the brand reputable businesses, in addition to governmental regulation, the risk of brand reputation loss from false greening will prohibit them from using conventional for green products. Though the greenness of reputable brands may not be high, they are more likely to take real green strategy than ordinary small and medium enterprises. For green certification scheme establishers and operators, it is of utmost impotance to keep the attractivity of the scheme to reputable brands. This paper also analyzes the factors influencing corporate to choose green third-party certification schemes, and gives some guidelines. A survey on Green Food production enterprises is conducted to understand current green branding status. Result shows that, the main driving force of fulfilling green branding strategy is to improve sustainable competitiveness and enlarge market portion, and green branding is a self-choice behavior to exceed governmental regulation; enterprises rely firstly on the adoption of third-party geen certification, then advertising and other ways to build green brands; enterprise green certification adoption presents a certain regularity in the order, for management certification, from the ISO9000 quality management system certification to HACCP certification and then to ISO 14001 environmental management system certification step by step for cost or procedural reasons, and for green product certification, there is a weak certification order from Harm-free Agricultural Product certification to Green Food certification and then to organic product certification according to cost and safety; the surveyed enterprises mostly adopt part greening strategy, few of them register product brand solely for green product; the frequency of certification body monitor and governmental regulatory agency inspection is very low, that means green product manufacturing enterprises are almost totally dependent on conscious motivation to move beyond the mandatory standards, while this situation also gives the enterprises opportunistic action space.Third-party green certification is also of characteristics of crudence property. The outbreak of industry-wide quality accident gives us opportunity to test the effectiveness of green certification. This paper probes into the melamine contamination accident in dairy industry in 2008 China, takes the inspected dairy enterprises as sample, use quantitative analytical method and test the effectiveness of relative green certification schemes. The result shows the ISO9000 and HACCP schemes have no significant effect in reducing the contamination risk, and the ISO 14001 scheme increases the contamination risk. The collective failure of the third-party management system certification schemes shows that China's certification and accreditation monitoring needs further innovation and improvement. The government should lose no time to straighten the certification bodies to promote third-party certification body to assume responsibility for social regulation, and to build green management systems and green products systems with enterprises. For green brand seeking enterprises, it is of great importance to deal with the relation between quality and development, and control intra-industry expansion impulse; not only abide by national coercive standard strictly but also adopt true greening strategy and establish strict product quality control and process management systems; provide high quality green product, improve green brand categority, lower green consumption choice cost, and gain win-win of green and development through green competivity improvement and market share expansion.The main contribution of this paper is:(1) according to choice cost paradigm of brand economics, the paper puts forward that, green brand is a tool to improve green consumption believeness and reduce choice cost, third-party green certification is a fundamental institution for green brand development, and a green brand is a coalition of green certification club brand and certificated coporate brand; (2) establishes certification scheme signal quality game models, and advances that while strengthening governmental supervision, third-party certification body building certification club brand and reputation can also help to improve the quality of the green certification; (3) argues that consumers' green purchase is not a one-time choice behavior but a frequency choice behavior, and establishes green purchase frequency choice model, and test quantitatively the factors influencing green purchase frequency; (4) establishes enterprise greenness optimal decision model, and put forward that under the imperfect condition of governmental supervision, enterprise brand and reputation can guarantee adopting true greening strategy; (5) the effectiveness of green certification system is evaluated for the first time on the industry level, the influencing factors of melamine contamination in dairy product industry is analysed by using binary choice model, and find that all the three green management systems studied fail to play an active role to reduce melamine contamination, and some on the contrary play a negative role in increasing the risk of contamination.One of the most important conclusions of this paper is that, green brand is a goal for enterprise to pursuit, and perfect green brand almost non-existent, by establishing a credible third-party green certification system and green signaling mechanisms, more enterprises could be lead to go to the green brand realm of freedom.