Research On Formation Mechanism And Promotion Strategies Of Service Industry Clusters Brand Value

Service industries have become the most important industry in some countries and regions in the world. There is an important rule in the development of service industries, that is,"Spatial concentration and agglomeration". With the development of service industries, service clusters become more and more popular, and some famous service clusters emerged all around the world, such as the finance cluster of Manhattan in New York, the producer services cluster of Shinjuku in Japan.Since the reform and opening up, especially since the1990s, service industries in our country gain rapid development because of the encouragement and guidance of our party and country. The added value of service industries accounted for43.4%in2009, and the employment in service industries accounted for34.6%in the total employment. Some scholars predicted that the proportion of service industries in GDP will rise4-5percentage points and reach about47%during the12th Five-Year Plan. Some famous service clusters had emerged in our country in recent years, such as the Beijing Central Business District, Shanghai Lujiazui financial and Trade Zone, the Shenzhen Central Business District and Guangzhou Pearl River New Town. However, service industries and service clusters in our country are lag behind comparing with service industries and service clusters in the developed countries and regions. On one hand, we are in the most low-end of the industry chain in the international division of labor of service industries, and we play the role of contractors and consumers. In the long term, service industry clusters in our country will encounter the awkward position which had emerged in manufacture industry clusters, the tragic transaction of "one hundred million shirts for an aircraft" will relay in the service industry. On the other hand, the rapid increase of China’s labor cost not only offsets the cost advantage relative to other countries and regions, but also hinders the development of service industries which have the characteristic of labor intensive.The key factors of modern economy are brand creation and brand marketing, and service industry cluster is no exception. Because of the feature of intangibility, service can not be perceived by consumer easily, and brand becomes a useful symbol for the quality of service and an important standard to choose service. So brand has a very special meaning for service industries and service industry clusters.There are lots of literatures on brand value. Most of the literatures are from the perspective of the enterprise, and from the view of cluster is short board of the existing research, especially service cluster perspective. Some problems had blocked the development of the theory of service industries cluster brand value. The development of the service industries cluster brand value theory had blocked by some problems, such as the definition is not clear, there is no systematic research for influence factors, the driving relationship among factors is not clear, there is no convincing empirical study. According to research contents and research purposes, this study uses some scientific method, including literature research, grounded theory and empirical research. Based on literature review, this study analyses the main factors which affect the value of service industries cluster brand, and constructs the formation mechanism model of service industries cluster brand value. Subsequently, using data collected form questionnaire method, this study verifies the validation of the theoretical model and hypotheses and proposes some pertinence strategies.In literature review, this study reviews and comments the literatures of service industries, service industry clusters, cluster brands and brand value. In order to achieve the research objectives, this study only reviews the literatures on the concept and classification of service industries among all the literatures on service industries. There are lots of categories of service industries because of the different classification standards. The literatures on service industry clusters including concepts, causes of formation, functions and effects etc.. But there are few literatures on the brand of service industry clusters. The literatures on cluster brands are also very rich, including concepts, categories, characteristics, effects and managements. These studies were either based on manufacturing industry clusters, either from the regional perspective. and there are few literatures from the perspective of service industry clusters. The literature on brand values mainly includes concepts, origin, promotion strategies and management, and they are almost all from the perspective of individual brand value of enterprises, no cluster brand value research.In the study of factors, considering the scarcity of literatures, this study introduces the grounded theory method, attempts to find the main factors which influence service industry clusters brand value through the interview data from the grounded analysis. Through the three steps of grounded theory, open registry, relational registry and select registry, this study find four main factors (categories), and the four factors are environmental factors of service industry clusters, input factors of individual brand, input factors of enterprise relationship and members interaction. Based on the four main factors, this study erects a simple service industry clusters brand value influencing factors model.In empirical analysis, this study constructs a theory model of service industry clusters brand value formation mechanism based on the review of the literature and the research of service industry clusters brand value influencing factors. According to the theory model, this study proposes26theoretical hypotheses, and tests these hypotheses using the collecting data deriving from questionnaire. Without considering the effects of inter-member interaction, the empirical results indicate that there is a positive relationship between the eight independent variables, which includes government behavior, intermediary behavior, financial environment, customer characteristics, individual brand value, individual brand management, inter-firm trust and the cognitive similarity of service industry clusters brand, and the dependent variable of service industry clusters brand value. Task-related interaction and social interaction are not only the direct influence factor for service industry clusters brand value, but also an intervening variable.On the basis of the previous research, this study puts forward some advice on the development of service industry clusters brand value from the perspective of government, intermediary, enterprise.The innovation of this study is summed up as following.(1) Based on the grounded theory, this study puts forward some key factors which affet service industry clusters brand value.(2) This study tests the relationship between the input factors and service industry clusters brand value.(3) This study introduces the members interaction into the formation process of service industry clusters brand value.