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The importance of local brands is widely accepted but despite a large body of academic research in areas such as place branding and place-of-origin effects, there is little understanding of what factors drive consumers’ preference for buying and producers’ willingness to participate in the development of local and/or regional brands that would be featured on their products’ labels. A place brand represents a promise or guarantee of quality for place-provenance products such as foods sourced and produced in a certain geographical area. Therefore, producers of foods across a variety of categories within a certain region need to collaborate and come to agreements in terms of provenance associations to build a coherent brand. Further, consumers need to share such associations and be willing to buy those brands. This paper investigates the ways in which consumers and producers’ sense of place identity defined at multiple levels along the Local-Mondial continuum, impacts their attitudes and behavioral intentions regarding the buying and the development of local versus regional place brands. From the producers’ perspective, the tradeoffs between developing specific brands at the village/city level versus developing regional brands which require a larger collaborative effort that cuts across multiple communities and geographies has not received adequate attention. From the consumers perspective, it is unclear whether consumers would respond differently to local versus regional brands.
The results of two studies attempt to provide some answers to these questions. Study 1 involves a sample of 280 consumers, the majority of which reside in Sibiu county. Study 2 involves a survey of 149 small and medium sized business owners located in 12 different town/village communities withing the boundaries of the GAL Marginimea Sibiului. Producers were 90% in sole ownership, evenly distributed between small, medium and relatively large firms. The business activity profile indicates that 70% of the businesses captured in the sample are food producers, primarily milk and cheese products (46%). The rest is represented by businesses that have a predominant hospitality service activity (90% bed and breakfasts).
Preliminary results indicate that consumers are more interested in buying a local brand than a regional brand for most product categories. However, in explanatory models, the local identity dimension has the strongest positive effect on both brands, and both are equally positively impacted by perceived importance of buying local traditional products and consumers’ trust in local producers. For the regional brand, the national identity dimension and trust in retail chains have added positive effects. Concerning producers overall, there seems to be a clear preference for supporting the development of a regional rather than a local brand although there are interesting differences in place identity effects along with environmental factors for each type of brand.
