Leader’s strategies for designing the promotional path of regional brand competitiveness in the context of economic globalization

Abstract

In the era of economic globalization, the competitiveness of products on a global scale is increasingly achieved through effective and sustainable strategies for brand development by the leaders. This paper conducts an empirical study on regional brand competitiveness (BC) influencing factors. A research model was proposed and tested by employing structural equation modeling. Data analysis was conducted using 214 valid questionnaires from two major producing areas in Jilin Province, China. Research results show that Brand Market (BM) and Government Guidance (GG) directly and positively impact the regional BC. Regional Resource (RR) and industrial development (ID) indirectly impact the regional BC through the mediating role of BM and GG. BM is the most important factor affecting the regional BC. Based on this, the path to improve the competitiveness of traditional agricultural products under economic globalization is determined, and targeted countermeasures and suggestions are formulated for the existing problems.

Exploring Business Owners’ Engagement Behavior for Promoting Regional Brands in China: An Empirical Analysis Based on the TPB and ABC Theory

“…It is intuitively reasonable that firms are more willing to participate in promoting RBs by exploiting regional resources, especially those with unique regional advantages. This finding complemented what was found by Li et al [26] when investigating RBs of agricultural industries, where it was mentioned that "the existence of resource endowment promotes not only the government's guidance and support for the development of characteristic agricultural industries but also the industry association's supervision of regional brands of characteristic agricultural products, thus playing a strong role of promotion". According to our analysis results, RA can also positively affect the attitude and further induce the behavior of business owners, in addition to its promotion from the government and industry association sides, for promoting RBs.…”

“…In our work, RA is such an antecedent of APRB that it offers location endowments and historical and cultural resources (Li et al [26]). For example, Wang [10] argued that consumers could identify the RBs of agricultural products by discerning the different geographic positions of agricultural products with regional elements.…”

“…Further, based on the theory of social exchange, when firms perceive a premium associated with RA, they actively participate in optimizing the allocation of regional resources to the process of building RBs (Klijn et al [33]) and display a positive attitude (Sirgy and Su [34]). Therefore, RA, which involves a business opportunity (Merrilees et al [35]), affects firms' APRB (Wang [10]) and facilitates good competitiveness (Li et al [26]). Based on this discussion, we formulated the following hypothesis:…”

“…This survey included the measures of RA, APRB, GP, CP, and BPRB, as well as five demographic variables, as shown in Table 2 below. We measured RA using the four items from Li et al [26]. We adapted APRB's items from diverse sources (Charton-Vachet et al [36]; Lee et al [50]; Maichum et al [31]; Paul et al [30]; Wang et al [55]).…”

“…According to the ABC theory, BPRB results from the combined effect of business owners' attitudes and contextual factors or environmental conditions; therefore, the firm owners exhibit behavior to gain certain expected benefits [25] by promoting place branding actively. As for the external conditions associated with the promotion of RBs, Li et al [26] and Yu et al [27] claimed that regional resources and government guidance, which were important stimuli for building RBs; Zhang et al [28] found that government support indirectly promoted companies' engagement behavior; and Zhou et al [15] introduced three dimensions regarding the government's policies about regional branding: (1) the demand side; (2) the supply side; and (3) environmental policies. However, as far as we know, no existing research has empirically examined the internal mechanism with respect to how external factors (i.e., resources, government policies)-which are also antecedent factors of the TPB-influence BPRB.…”