How Regional Brands Transform into Market Brands

The brand marketing of agricultural products is absolutely a major event in market development in recent years. Agricultural products, which have always been hopelessly rustic, have surprisingly come to care about branding, and this idea is increasingly taking hold in people's minds - the charm of the market economy is truly evident!

If we briefly look back, the marketing of agricultural products in recent years has already taken the key step from product to commodity. Think back: in the early days of reform and opening up, when we bought agricultural products, who could have thought of any brand? In state-run stores, you bought whatever was supplied, and having anything at all was good enough. Later, as rural reform was carried out across the board and agricultural products began to become abundant, only then did people gradually gain the ability to compare and distinguish, and the regional agricultural product brands familiar to people today slowly emerged. This was a remarkable achievement. For example, when it comes to apples, everyone knows Yantai apples; later Shaanxi apples also rose and gained great fame; and within Shaanxi apples, Luochuan is promoted first, followed by Baishui, Xunyi and others; Gansu's Tianshui and Jingning Huaniu apples also enjoy considerable renown in the market. Another example: goji berries are definitely better from Ningxia, but which place in Ningxia? The promotion of regional brands made the place name Zhongning widely known. Many other examples could be listed, such as Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, Gannan navel oranges, Wuchang rice, Shatian pomelo, Hainan bananas, Longkou vermicelli, Zhanhua winter jujubes, and so on.

In order to build regional agricultural product brands, localities have spared no effort, holding all kinds of festivals and fairs, carrying out picking tourism activities, hiring image spokespersons at high salaries, and conducting extensive publicity. This has promoted the spread of a number of regional agricultural product brands and formed considerable brand value. According to the "2013 Ranking of the Brand Value of China's Regional Public Brands of Agricultural Products" released by the China Agricultural Brand Research Center, the top 50 regional agricultural product brands on the list all had brand values exceeding 2.5 billion yuan. Among them, Fuling Zhacai (Fuling pickled mustard tuber), ranked first in brand value, reached 12.532 billion yuan; Yantai apples ranked second (9.405 billion yuan); and Heilongjiang's Lanxi flax ranked third (8.588 billion). Other agricultural product brands on the list also had high market visibility. For tea, those selected included West Lake Longjing, Anxi Tieguanyin, Xinyang Maojian, Dongting Biluochun, Fuding White Tea and others; for apples, besides Yantai, there were also Lingbao apples, Luochuan apples, Qixia apples, Jingning apples, Pingliang golden fruit and others. It can be said that the building of agricultural product brands has achieved obvious results and has also formed a reputation in the consumer market, creating a good atmosphere for the development of local industries.

However, the focus of what the author wants to say today is not here, but rather this: the formation of the above-mentioned regional public agricultural product brands has only completed the first step in agricultural product brand building. It has only solved the problem of having brands, but has not yet established a more effective market brand system. The building of agricultural product brands is still underway.

Let us first discuss the problems of the current regional public agricultural product brands. There may be constraints such as difficulty in unifying quality standards and a not-high-enough level of production technology, but the core issue is still that the degree of marketization of the brands is not high, which easily leads to the "tragedy of the commons." It can be said that today's regional public agricultural product brands are like public land resources or property: they have many owners, each of whom has the right to use them but no right to stop others from using them, thus causing overuse and depletion of the resource. Take apples as an example. Many fruit vendors actually have many kinds of packaging; whatever brand you want, they will use the corresponding outer packaging, while the actual contents are not from the place of origin at all. A reporter once saw at a fruit merchant's place in one locality all kinds of apple packaging boxes for different places of origin such as Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu, and in different languages such as English and Russian, but the supply of goods simply did not match. Therefore, in the current field of agricultural product brands, everything is still chaotic and hard to sort out. All kinds of counterfeiting emerge endlessly, and the phenomenon of selling dog meat under the sign of mutton cannot be stopped despite repeated bans. Consumers generally already know which places produce good agricultural products, but they cannot solve the problem of "whose should I buy?"

Tea is an obvious example. China currently has a tea market that is large as a whole while its business entities are small and scattered. For Tieguanyin alone, there are truly no telling how many hundreds or thousands of companies operating in the market. Who is the real Li Kui and who is the fake Li Gui is by no means easy to tell. If we want to buy tea, we first have to find the regional brand - Yunnan Pu'er or northern Fujian oolong? Second, we have to find which company is reliable. But Britain's Lipton, as the world's largest tea company, is not like this. Its annual sales are 20 billion yuan, and customers only know they are drinking Lipton black tea, without having to ask whether it is Indian black tea, Sri Lankan black tea or Chinese black tea. In Lipton's case, the company's market brand surpasses the regional brand of the tea-producing area.

Lipton also gives rise to a proposition about Chinese tea - why can China's 70,000 tea companies not match one British Lipton? Of course, this proposition is problematic, because China's tea culture and the West's are different. China's tea culture has too deep a heritage, which objectively has created the current situation of numerous small regional brands, and it is difficult to respond to the market simply and broadly with black tea or green tea. Of course, it is also true that China lacks enterprises with the strength to integrate regional brands. However, the situation is not entirely unchanged. For example, Tenfu Tea, which opens specialty stores everywhere, has taken a gratifying step in building tea market brands, initially integrating China's high-quality tea resources and developing as many as more than 1,800 Tenfu series products, including packaged teas and tea bags such as oolong tea, green tea, black tea, Pu'er tea and scented tea. To make customers think of going to Tenfu to drink authentic Tieguanyin, rather than Anxi Tieguanyin also being sold at Tenfu, is a very difficult shift in consumer thinking. The logic behind it is the transformation from regional brands to market brands. Recently, Lenovo went into West Lake Longjing, which is in fact also combining a regional brand with a commercial brand, trying to open a new path for agricultural product brand marketing.

So my view is already clear: the regional brands of agricultural products must ultimately be transformed into market brands held with enterprises as the main body. From now on, we must not only know which places produce good agricultural products, but also know which company's brand of local agricultural products is good. At present, the following work needs to be done well:

Continue to advance the building of regional agricultural product brands. It must be admitted that for agricultural products, regionality is precisely what makes them unique relative to industrial products. Highly standardized industrial products have no regional differences, while agricultural products, which are shaped by the local water and soil that nurture the local people, do have them. This also brings agricultural product marketing an important opportunity: the ability to fully tap regional characteristics and advantages so as to open up differentiated markets. Therefore, regional brands are the foundation of market brands. Although a large number of regional agricultural product brands have now appeared, the excavation of their cultural heritage is still far from adequate, production standards are still very inconsistent, and low-price competition within the same industry is serious. Further action by local governments is needed, such as strengthening regional brand management and regulating production and sales behavior.

Continue to deepen the depth of agricultural product market brands. Culture is the foundation of a brand. Regional differences among agricultural products are great, but the phenomenon of homogeneity among major agricultural products is still unavoidable, so a breakthrough can only be sought in regional cultural heritage. For example, the unique brand connotations of Wuchang rice and the beautiful story of Gansu Huaniu apples are the inner vitality of the brands. But all of this must ultimately focus on the main body of the market - enterprises. Either cultivate local enterprises or bring in enterprises, integrating enterprise brands with the building of regional brands, so that the brand foundation can endure. At the same time, accelerate the industry-wide union of farmers' specialized cooperative organizations so that they play an important role in agricultural brand building.

Accelerate the building of a quality standard system for agricultural product brands. The first priority is standardization, to resolve the contradiction between small-scale production by millions of households and the large market. With unified standards, standardized input management, scientific production management and strict storage and processing, agricultural products that in theory cannot be fully standardized can become relatively standardized, with external quality and internal quality relatively consistent. This is the production foundation of brand marketing. Second, efforts must be made to resolve trust in quality by establishing a whole-process traceability system, using scientific means to give consumers peace of mind. Third, efforts must be made in publicizing brand characteristics, turning non-standardized methods of identifying agricultural products by feel and appearance into standardized, simple methods that ordinary consumers can easily use. For example, the two leaves and one bud and the flat tea-leaf shape of West Lake Longjing, and the physical identification methods promoted for Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs.

Strengthen the protection of agricultural product brands. Today's brand protection is mostly in the fields of industrial and commercial brands. Agricultural brands are still at the stage of cultivation and growth, but it can be foreseen that as time goes by, the protection of agricultural brands will also become a real issue. Especially when enterprises are the main body of the brands, this situation will be unavoidable. At present, relevant rules for agricultural brand protection need to be improved, such as the authorization-to-use system and the system of protection of geographical indications of origin, and how to use them to respond to brand counterfeiting and infringement; how the protection of agricultural enterprise brands should be defined between regional public brands and commercial brands, and so on - these need study.