Research On The Influencing Factors And Mechanisms Of Place Brand Lock-in Effect

With the globalization of the world economy,the degree of aggregation of product manufacturers or a certain industry has not been dispersed.At the same time,the world economic landscape has been dominated by various industrial clusters.In this context,relying on industrial clusters to build place brands with regional characteristics is conducive to the development of regional economy and give full play to regional competitive advantages.However,with the development of regional products or characteristic industries into place brands,there are many theoretical and practical problems in the development process.For example,after enterprises in a cluster gather in a certain space to form an economy,they tend to rely on the past inherent development foundation and model in the process of development driven by agglomeration effect and new innovation factors,which leads to a "path dependence" phenomenon;Due to the public product attribute of place brands,some small and medium-sized enterprises have an opportunistic "free-riding" behavior,which leads to "tragedy of shared land" or "lemon market";The contradiction between enterprise's private brand and cluster's public brand leads to the abuse and deterioration of the place brands;The government and intermediary agencies fail to give full play to their role,which leads to the ineffective implementation of place brand strategy;The serious homogenization of products in the region makes the competitive advantage of place brands no longer exist.All these problems will gradually reduce the influence of place brands and make their development unsustainable,and eventually affect the development of regional economy,leading to the "lock-in" shape of the whole region.In view of this,this study focuses on the basic problem of "place brand lock-in effect",comprehensively uses the theories and analytical measurement methods of new institutional economics,regional economics,marketing and industrial economics,etc.,through the theoretical analysis and literature review of place brand lock-in effect,and on this basis,using the standardized grounded theory qualitative research method,the paper codes the embedding factors of place brand lock-in effect,proposes the content dimensions of them,designs the initial items,develops the measurement scale of embedding factors of place brand lock-in effect,and constructs the mechanism model of influencing factors of place brand lock-in effect with the help of structural equation theory.In the end,this paper puts forward the measures and methods to release the place brand lock-in effect and promote the place brand upgrading from the two aspects of "path creation" breaking path dependence and "institution innovation" promoting place brand development.This not only introduces the institutional change theory,Embeddedness theory and social capital theory into the study of place brand lock-in effect,enriches the theory of place brand,but also provides a measurement tool for place brand lock-in effect in practice,fills the research gap of brand theory in industrial cluster,and conducive to the development and expansion of place brand,strengthens its brand effect,and finally promote the growth of regional economy and the prosperity of national economy.This paper consists of six chapters,following the idea of "finding and putting forward problems-analyzing problems-analyzing the causes of problems-suggestions for promoting place brand upgrading-theoretical achievements of path mechanism".First of all,basic theoretical analysis and literature review of place brand lock-in effect are carried out.Starting from the cluster dependence of place brands,this paper analyzes the formation process of place brands,and holds that industrial clusters are not only the foundation and optimal carriers for the development of place brands,but also conducive to the growth and maintenance of place brands.Therefore,combined with the research needs and the actual situation,this paper defines the place brands based on the concept of industrial clusters.Then the formation of place brand lock-in effect is analyzed,the negative feedback mechanism of place brand path dependence is revealed,and the place brand lock-in effect is defined accordingly.By analyzing the relationship between path dependence theory,embeddedness theory,relational capital theory and lock-in effect,it is pointed out that path dependence restricts the implementation of institutional change.If the wrong path is chosen,it will eventually lead to the decline of economic society and the emergence of "lock-in".At the same time,embeddeding factors are decisive to path dependence in the process of institutional change.Embeddedness theory puts the choice behavior into the established social relations,social structures and social networks,that is,the choice behavior will be affected by many factors such as cultural structure,market,etc.However,the relational capital formed by long-term interaction between enterprises can create new paths and avoid the emergence of path dependence and lock-in effect.Next,based on the institutional perspective,this paper analyzes the path dependence of location choice,development evolution,internal environment and relationship network.Through analyzing the factors that hinder the development of place brand,this paper proposes that we should analyze the lock-in effect from multiple perspectives,which lays a theoretical foundation for the follow-up researches.secondly,taking 145 place brands involving different industries as the research object,following the standardized qualitative research method of grounded theory,24 open coding can be obtained by open code,such as economic downturn,scale failure,increase industry transfer,lack of self-organization system characteristics,restriction of cluster social network relations,insufficient technical and economic links between upstream and downstream,low integration of industrial resources,economic base difference,regional dependence,weak infrastructure,asset specificity,vicious competition,convergence of entrepreneurs' mental models,institutional path dependence,inadequate protection of intellectual property rights,local protectionism,inertia of independent innovation,talent shortage,closed information circle,imperfect information sharing system,insufficient cultural connotation,insufficient cultural excavation,pessimistic psychological expectation and associative dislocation;9axial coding can be obtained by axial code,such as industry life cycle risk,imperfect industrial chain,regional segregation,severe cluster internal friction,policy failure,insufficient technology spillover,group thinking,cultural default and consumer psychology bias.Then,proposes the content dimensions of embedding factors of place brand lock-in effect,and designs the initial items based on them.After collecting survey data through questionnaires for 145 place brands,a formal scale consisting of six dimensions of industry development status,enterprise industry foundation,government macro policy,local development strategy,association cognitive guidance and consumer surplus value,as well as26 measurement items,was determined by using reliability and validity test to eliminate the measurement items with low correlation.It is further proved that the scale has good single dimension and reliability,and is a stable and effective measurement framework.Then,the paper constructs the mechanism model of the influencing factors of place brand lock-in effect with the help of structural equation theory,and puts forward relevant research hypotheses,and tests the model and hypotheses with the methods of questionnaire survey and empirical analysis.Among them,the measuring items of embedding factors of place brand lock-in effect are obtained from the pre research,namely,the measurement scale of embedding factors of place brand lock-in effect,the measuring items of path dependence,relational capital and lock-in effect are mostly from the mature scales that have been tested by other scholars and combined with the actual situation of place brand research to modify.Through an empirical study of 281 place brands in China,SPSS21.0 and AMOS23.0 were used to test the reliability and validity of the obtained questionnaire data,measure and analyze the structural equation model,and the study concluded that:(1)place brand lock-in effect is caused by different embedding factors,such as industry development status,enterprise industrial foundation,government macro policy,local development strategy,association cognitive guidance and consumer surplus value;(2)embedding factors positively affect path dependence,while path dependence positively affect the lock-in effect,and path dependence plays a partial intermediary role between the two;(3)effective use of relational capital by enterprises will negatively moderate the positive effect of path dependence on lock-in effect.Finally,from the two aspects of "path creation" breaking path dependence and "institution innovation" promoting place brand development,this paper explores the measures and methods to release the place brand lock-in effect and promote its upgrading.