| China’s comprehensive initiatives of the rural revitalisation strategy has promoted the modernisation of agriculture and rural areas and the development of quality agricultural products."The 14 th Five-Year Plan" clearly emphasises the need to build brand advantages for agricultural products.Regional brands,as a quality signal,represent the collective reputation of farmers or enterprises in a particular region and can enhance consumers’ perception of the quality of agricultural products.At the same time,through the implementation of the ecommerce platform to help farmers,the online sales of branded agricultural products have continued to increase.However,there are significant differences in the popularity of regional brands,resulting in uneven brand strength.In recent years,with the implementation of the policy of "strengthening agriculture with brands" and "promoting agriculture with digital business",the trend of "branding& platform" for agricultural products has become more and more obvious.The sales of regional brand agricultural products sold on e-commerce platforms are inevitably influenced by internet word-of-mouth(IWOM).IWOM is an important quality signal sent by consumers who have purchased the product,and can influence potential consumers’ purchasing decisions and product sales.The impact of IWOM on product sales may vary across regional brands with different reputations.Therefore,it is important to study the mechanism of IWOM’s influence on the sales of regional branded agricultural products.Based on the Jingdong e-commerce platform,this paper used a web crawler tool to obtain online sales data of apple agricultural products using the keyword "apple fruit",and obtained 5525 valid sample observations.Based on the timepoint-province fixed-effects model and the mixed OLS model,the study uses a multiple regression empirical approach to carry out basic regression and robustness tests.In the specific empirical evidence,this paper uses official brand report documents to define strong and weak regional brands,analyses the impact of regional brands on online sales of agricultural products and the difference in the impact of different regional brands on sales,and investigates the effect of the number of positive and negative internet word-of-mouth on online sales of agricultural products.The study concluded that regional brands can significantly increase online sales of apple produce.Both strong and weak regional brands can effectively promote the increase of online sales of agricultural products,with strong regional brands contributing more significant promoting effect.At the same time,for regional brands with different popularity,there are significant differences in the effect of IWOM on the sales of agricultural products.Specifically,positive IWOM can effectively improve the online sales of agricultural products of strong regional brands and weak regional brands,and the promotion effect on the sales of weak regional brands is stronger.On the contrary,negative IWOM has no significant impact on the sales of agricultural products of strong regional brands,but it will inhibit the effect of weak regional brands on the sales of agricultural products,resulting in a decline in sales.Based on the analysis and research findings of the study,this paper proposes the following suggestions: firstly,attention should be paid to the construction and promotion of regional brand of agricultural products,and the supervision and guarantee mechanism of regional brand evaluation should be improved.Secondly,the brand display mechanism of e-commerce platforms should be improved,and the leading role of platforms should be brought into play to highlight the high quality and high reputation of regional brands.Finally,e-commerce platforms should improve the rules of IWOM,improve the management norms of IWOM,and form more effective protection for regional brands of agricultural products through real and accurate IWOM. |
PDF Full Text Request