How Modern Agriculture Builds Core Competitiveness Through Branding
Branding is the core competitiveness and core hallmark of agricultural modernization. Strong brands make strong agriculture and a strong China; developing brand agriculture should become a national will, a national concept and a national strategy. Recently, at the 2014 China Brand Agriculture Development Conference held in Qingdao, Shandong, leading officials, experts and industry elites gathered to pool the practical exploration experience and important theoretical consensus on brand agriculture in China.
Experts at the conference believe that modern agriculture has entered a new stage with brand building as its focal point. Accelerating the building of agricultural brands is an inevitable choice for transforming the mode of agricultural development, responding to the upgrading of the consumption structure and participating in international competition, and it is an urgent task for accelerating modern agriculture. Brand agriculture building requires sound overall planning and related policy arrangements; optimizing institutions and mechanisms to break through the bottlenecks constraining brand building; properly handling the relationship between government guidance and market entities; and identifying each region's own distinctive features to achieve differentiated development.
Strong brands make a strong China: elevating brand agriculture to a strategic height for planning
Brand building has become an important path for regional economic development, an inevitable choice for the development of distinctive industries, the core of market entities' competitive advantage, and an important guarantee for agricultural product quality and safety to win market trust.
Yin Chengjie, former Vice Minister of Agriculture and President of the China Agricultural Economics Society, said that what brand agriculture transforms is the mode of production, what it adapts to is consumer demand, and what it wins is market space. The inexhaustible driving force for the development of brand agriculture comes from the improvement of management levels, as well as innovation by agricultural enterprises and the enormous market demand of consumers.
“The era of the brand revolution for China's kitchen and dining table food has arrived. To put it plainly, it is about capturing the vegetable basket, the oil can, the palate and the fruit plate. This is the most important strategic opportunity, and it can be called the sixth wealth wave. The previous wealth waves were real estate, energy, finance, the internet and so on. This wealth wave will be accompanied by an industrial revolution in the agricultural sector. In the next 30 years, the world will look to China, China will look to agriculture, and agriculture will look to brands.” said Lou Xiangpeng, a brand marketing expert.
Liu Qi, chief expert of the China Institute for Rural Studies at Tsinghua University and Vice President of the China Agricultural Economics Society, believes that if brands win, agriculture wins; if brands are strong, agriculture is strong. In the agrarian society before the 18th century, China was always the leader in agriculture. China, with several thousand years of outstanding agricultural civilization, should shoulder the heavy responsibility and continue to lead the development of world agriculture. A great China should lead great agriculture, and great agriculture should focus on supporting great strategies; leading agricultural modernization with brand development is the key point. Brand agriculture must be planned at the level of a concept and a national strategy.
Modern agriculture has entered a new stage with brand building as its focal point
“Agricultural development is facing a critical juncture in the transition from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture. The consumption of agricultural products has entered a historical period that pays more attention to quality and brands. In this period, developed countries all took the implementation of agricultural brand strategies as an important lever, thereby smoothly achieving a major leap in the quality and efficiency of agricultural development. With China's economic and social development and progress, accelerating the implementation of agricultural brand strategies and vigorously advancing branding has become urgent.” said Zhang Yuxiang, a specially appointed researcher of the Counsellors' Office of the State Council and President of the China Agricultural Products Market Association.
Zhang Yuxiang said: “World agricultural development has all gone through the process of products going from shortage to abundance, and from general production to brand building. Developed countries demonstrate their competitive strength internationally through a large number of branded products. Especially in recent years, competition dominated by branded agricultural products has become increasingly fierce. Developed countries such as those in Europe, the United States and Japan compete fiercely in this field, forcing us to advance branding.”
Experts pointed out that advancing agricultural branding is an inherent requirement of developing modern agriculture, and modern agriculture has now entered a new stage with brand building as its focal point. Practice shows that the development of brand agriculture plays an increasingly prominent role in promoting and driving China's modern agriculture: First, it drives the scaling-up, specialization, standardization and industrialization of agriculture. Second, it enhances agricultural efficiency. The value of a brand lies in its ability to establish a stable consumer group and form a stable market share; branded products can obtain product pricing power, increase income elasticity and raise farmers' incomes. Third, it safeguards quality and safety. Fourth, it enhances market competitiveness. A brand is the market; some provinces and cities have successfully cultivated regional public brands, enterprise brands and so on, becoming strong agricultural provinces. Through agricultural branding, it is conducive to establishing a carrier and restraint mechanism for the quality, safety and reputation management of agricultural products, conducive to promoting the concentration of agricultural production in advantageous regions and the optimization of the industrial structure, and ultimately promotes the improvement of agricultural competitiveness and upgrading and transformation.