Frontiers in Business, Economics and Management ISSN: 2766-824X | Vol. 9, No. 2, 2023 153 Study on Countermeasures for Regional Brand of Agricultural Products Embedding Regional Cultural Elements Qiwan Wang, Yan Tai School of Business, Changzhou University, Changzhou 213000, China Abstract: Setting up regional brand image with unique regional characteristics is the key point for the development of regional brand of agricultural products.The organic combination of regional culture and regional brand of agricultural products is an effective way to realize brand differentiation and uniqueness. In addition to the basic functional requirements of products, consumers’ aesthetic demands for packaging design are also gradually elevated with the development of the times. Therefore, taking regional cultural elements as the research object, this research points out the existing problems in the construction of regional brand of agricultural products and puts forward the effective strategies of embedding regional cultural marks into the packaging design of agricultural products. It is expected to contribute to the achievement of the innovative integration between regional culture and regional brand of agricultural products, and provide reference for regional brand managers to carry out brand marketing. Keywords: Regional brand of agricultural products, Regional culture, Brand identity. 1. Introduction Culture is an outstanding advantage of regional brand construction. After 5,000 years of continuous development of Chinese civilization, it has given birth to unique natural culture, historical culture and humanistic culture in different regions, which are beneficial to inspire people associating with cultural value and stimulating purchase desire[1]. Therefore, cultural resources in a specific region can form the core competitiveness of regional brand of agricultural products[2]. Regional culture is an important part of cultural resources, which can establish regional brand image of agricultural products in consumers’ mind. However, due to its late start and brief development history, the varying levels of cultural construction among various brands, as well as the fact that cultural exploration forms outweigh connotations, have seriously hindered the steady development of regional agricultural product brands[1]. In addition, insufficient exploitation of brand advantage resources and insufficient utilization of cultural resources related to their own products cannot be ignored in the process of brand promotion and marketing in agricultural regions. Moreover, China's development has entered a new era and the packaging design of most agricultural products cannot effectively combine with local culture, so as to fail to meet the requirements of external sales in the Internet era[3]. Meanwhile, consumers begin to pursue the profound cultural connotations and aesthetic connotations in products. So combining with regional cultural characteristics to create a distinctive image as well as to strengthen the cultural construction and competitiveness of regional brand of agricultural products have become an urgent problem. 2. Development Status of Regional Brand of Agricultural Products at Home and Abroad 2.1. The emphasis on regional culture is not enough Regional culture is the integration of natural culture and social culture, including the material cultural heritage, customs, lifestyle and production mode in the region[4], which can highlight regional advantages and folk customs[1]. Thus regional brand of agricultural products can rely on regional advantages to dig regional culture deeply as a brand value symbol and further combine the unique culture with products. It is beneficial to to expand the publicity and influence by highlighting the difference of regional brand and establish a unique brand image of regional brand of agricultural products. This, in turn, has become an unreplicable scarce resource, which can stimulate customers' demand for higher levels and enhance the added value of agricultural products, so as to achieve the purpose of enhancing agricultural products and regional brand’s awareness[3]. However, for the use of regional cultural elements, there are still some misunderstandings as the following. The emphasis on regional culture is not enough. The construction of regional brand should concentrate on making good use of specific regional resource, including not only natural resources, climate conditions, planting technology, but also regional cultural resources, such as natural geography culture, humanistic culture and historical culture. Product development and design based on cultural characteristics can stimulate customers' positive emotional cognition and attitude, gain consumers' favor and maintain competitive advantages. For example, color of buildings in Japan's Kumamoto Prefecture is mainly black and there is a unique volcanic natural landscape. So the designer integrated the black and red color element representing the volcano into the IP image 154 design, creating the classic "Kumamoto Bear" urban brand, which has become a distinct "code" of Kumamoto Prefecture and achieved global success. The brand logo of Beijing "Pinggu Big Peach" agricultural products regional brand is designed to integrate Beijing Temple of Heaven with Pinggu Peach, highlighting the history and culture of Beijing and showing a distinct brand image. In general, if the packaging design of agricultural products can integrate into the unique cultural elements of the region, like "Pinggu Da Tao", it can form different advantages and arouse consumption desire [5]. However, the phenomenon of ignoring regional cultural characteristics still exists in large numbers. The relevant subjects of regional brands of agricultural products do not pay attention to the use of regional cultural elements in promoting and fail to effectively combine agricultural products with local culture, thus failing to reflect regional characteristics. Although the agricultural products have the advantage of superior quality, their competitiveness is still not strong and the brand advantage cannot be highlighted, resulting in the phenomenon of "unknown products". In addition to ignoring regional culture, some enterprises or other relevant subjects are aware of the important role of regional culture, but the problem lies in the inability to utilize cultural elements in a effective way. In particular, the packaging combined with cultural elements has not invested enough funds resulting in rough or exquisite, which cannot show the characteristics of the product. Finally, people’s aesthetic needs are wrongly judged. In the process of mining and using regional culture resource, problems arose such as copying, applying elements to regional cultural derivatives directly [4] and the form of brand and culture integration is greater than the connotation [1]. For example, the mascots "Jin Jin" and "Hua Hua" launched by Jinhua City in 2019 to build the city brand simply appropriated the images of the Buddha hand and camelia directly and the designed images were not match with Jinhua city visual image logo style [6], which could not generate cultural identity and emotional resonance for the public and reflect the regional cultural characteristics well. Resulting in serious homogenization phenomenon in market and disconnecting of product’s cultural elements design with the actual needs, which for product sales is very unfavorable. 2.2. Brand awareness of relevant stakeholders is not strong In addition to controlling the quality of regional agricultural products, brand is also an issue that should be paid attention to. As a symbol of quality and safety, establishing brand awareness while carrying out high-quality brand promoting[7] is an efficient way to build regional brand of agricultural products.The successful brand’s establishment needs a process from scratch to excellent and it is a long process to develop into a brand with distinctive characteristics in the minds of customers. The packaging design of regional agricultural products should always bear in mind the brand awareness, which can enhance the memory of brand [3]. Although Japan has a small land area, relatively undiversified climate conditions and relatively scarce agricultural industry resources, its agricultural products are highly competitive. The reason is that it has carried out the strategy of "One Village, One Product" to strengthen brand building. The One Village, One Product campaign not only focuses on products and agricultural industry but also pays close attention to cultivate talent ability and innovation consciousness. Compared with foreign countries, regional brand of agricultural products in our country has the late start of development and the unbalanced development of regional economic. It lead to the uneven distribution of resources including enterprises, talents and technology, moreover, there are relevant subjects such as the farmers, the government, enterprises and industrial associations, which make the construction of regional brand of agricultural products to create some common problems. Firstly, due to their own limitations, traditional farmers have low educational level generally that lead to pay little attention to brands, let alone have no awareness of trademark registration. Secondly, the lack of talents in production cooperatives leads to the lack of brand cultivation. Government departments cannot found perfect standardized construction system to benefit the people[8]. Enterprises cannot effectively integrate technology, policies, culture and other resources to carry out brand promotion, resulting in ineffective measures[9]. Moreover, the interaction and information communication of various interest subjects is weak, which cannot form the advantage of "1+1>2". For example, the lack of support and cooperation of industry associations for enterprises leads to the lack of accurate grasp of agricultural products market. In conclusion, owing to the widespread problems in various links of farmers, cooperatives, governments or enterprises, it is not conducive to regional brand awareness while affect the construction of powerful brands. 2.3. Ignoring the spatial characteristics of the brand identity Brand identity is the most important symbol of a brand, which plays a key role in establishing brand image and strengthening brand recognition[10]. Previous studies have shown that brand identity has such spatial characteristics as straight and inclined, multi-angle and rounded, which have different impacts on consumers' perception or brand attitude. Correct brand identity conveys the sense of stability, safety and reliability, so that individuals can have higher reliability evaluation of products [11]. Due to the publicity of regional brand of agricultural products, there are many relevant stakeholders, one of the most important is the enterprises in the region. In order to differentiate from the brand image of other enterprises, different enterprises in the region will use their own brand logos in the product packaging.The shortcoming is that there are also problems in the use of brand identity. For example, "Fuling Zhacai" regional brand of agricultural products is a characteristic agricultural brand in Chongqing and has a high brand value. "Yuyang Zhacai" is a traditional enterprise brand within the regional brand. After years of development, product packaging of "Yuyang Zhacai" still uses an old-fashioned style that can not be well matched with modern new consumer demand to attract young generation. Besides, its brand identity is also piled up in the corner, ignoring the important role of the brand identity space characteristics. So neither can it make full use of the traditional characteristics of the regional brand of agricultural products to design suitable brand identity, nor can it form the characteristic elements in the mind of consumers finally. 3. Countermeasures and Suggestions 3.1. Excavate regional cultural value and make use of regional cultural resources According to the existing research, the classification of regional culture mainly includes the geographical culture that 155 contains the physical geographical features, the historical culture that contains places of historical interest and the humanistic culture that contains the region's unique customs, myths, traditional crafts. Based on these three categories, regional cultural identifiers can be divided into physical geographical cultural identifiers, historical cultural identifiers and humanistic cultural identifiers. Studied on graphic logos show that graphics are easier to understand for consumers, they spend less perceptual effort than other types of logos in this process so they respond more positively to images or graphics. For example, consumers with higher brand familiarity respond more positively to the use of graphic brand logos[11]. It can be seen that regional cultural signs have the characteristics of high fluency in processing graphic signs, which can arouse positive emotional attitude. Therefore, enterprises should fully subdivide and focus on mining regional natural geography culture, historical culture, humantic culture and other cultural resources, condensed out with the regional culture of the region. These measures should be applied to the packaging design of agricultural products. As a typical example, Luochuan paper-cut culture is a characteristic folk culture in northern Shanxi known as "culture cut on red paper" , "Luochuan apple" as a local agricultural products regional brand can combine modern marketing concepts to achieve the purpose of integrating paper-cutting culture and Luochuan apple. This measure has strengthened the regional cultural value meanwhile activates the traditional Chinese culture. In addition, due to the close connection between various aspects of regional culture, humantic culture can also gradually condense into historical culture after time accumulation. It can be seen that it is necessary to avoid the simple classification and extraction of cultural elements in isolation 3.2. Relying on high-quality talents to strengthen the function of revelent stakeholders The successful practice and theoretical research of the “One Village, One product” movement in Japan have influenced agricultural industry and brand building in different countries. Talent cultivation is the core factor[8]. Relevant stakeholders in the regional brands of agricultural products in our country should pay particular attention to the cultivation and introduction of talents.The first is the planting of agricultural products. On the one hand, it is necessary to popularize and explain basic breeding technology and knowledge of physical geography for farmers, on the other hand, it is also necessary to increase the introduction of professional and technical personnel, carry out cooperation with research institutes and universities to fundamentally improve the source quality of agricultural products by relying on professional technology or talents. Secondly, in the operation process, the promotion of marketing cannot be separated from the tripartite cooperation of the government, enterprises and cooperatives. Different studies have shown that the three play different roles in different stages of brand building[7], but the collaboration of the three is always an effective form. Faced with the problem that the policies and preferential measures formulated by the government are difficult to benefit the grassroots community[8], it is essential to strengthen the recognition of the specific national conditions or regional development status. According to the actual work out a reasonable plan to benefit the farmers and provide more employment opportunities. For enterprises and third-party cooperative organizations, brand publicity is a key step which is beneficial to ensure quality and pay attention to the construction of standardized service system in the early. In the middle and later stages of development, professional associations should be established to explore new marketing modes[9]. For example, the agricultural brand building mode of single category means to build agricultural brands with high market share by producing quality agricultural products based on he industrial clusters that have been formed [12]. In addition, cooperation should be gradually carried out in the aspects of improving quality and efficiency, optimizing service and so on. At the same time, in this process, it is especially necessary to increase the intensity of talent mining and capital investment in each link, so as to attract talents and cultivate leaders who master management and sales skills[8]. 3.3. Design a reasonable brand identity according to the spatial characteristics The research on embodied cognition theory shows that the correct and slanted features of brand identity can exert positive or negative effects on brand attitude or preference and purchase intention by influencing consumers' perception."Correct" conveys the characteristics of trust, stability and reliability, which in turn will cause consumers to have a sense of reliability, safety and trust, so as to improve the reliability evaluation of products[13]. In addition, it can be found from the research on brand types that brand can be divided into two types according to the time characteristics: modern brand and traditional brand.Traditional brands often match the attributes of reliability and safety; modern brands match the attributes of change and innovation[10].For regional brands of agricultural products, firstly, most agricultural products are food, fruits and vegetables or aquatic products, and consumers have higher requirements for quality and safety. Secondly, the breeding and processing of agricultural products embodies humanity culture and many processing technologies are passed down through history. Therefore, the regional brand of agricultural products also has the characteristics of a long history of traditional brands. Enterprises in agricultural products regional brands, especially those with a long history of development, should design and use correct brand logos to convey to consumers the information of excellent quality of agricultural products and a long history of brands, so as to stimulate consumers' positive perception or brand attitude. For regional brands and enterprises of agricultural products that want to upgrade products, extend the industrial chain, and break the traditional cognition of brands in the past, they should attach importance to the connotation of the spatial feature metaphor of "slanting". Only in this way, can we achieve the purpose of attracting customers' attention and conveying unique information, which is relatively more beneficial to brands and enterprises. This has an important role for enterprises to achieve how to establish a long-term foothold in the market, establish a unique enterprise brand, and develop into a leading enterprise in agricultural regional brand. Acknowledgment This work was supported by the Key Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (2020SJZDA057) “Research on the Formation Mechanism and Development Countermeasures of Regional Brand Ecosphere in Industrial Clusters”. 156 References [1] L. Yang, et al. Application errors and improvement strategies of cultural value in the construction of regional public brand of agricultural products[J]. Hubei Agricultural Sciences, 2022, 61(17): 209-213. [2] J. Lu, et al. Study on Cooperative building of regional brand of agricultural products under Rural Revitalization Strategy- Based on the perspective of value co-creation [J].Research on Economics and Management 2022,43(04):96-110. [3] D. Liang. Research on Brand packaging Design of regional agricultural products under Rural revitalization [J]. Time- honored brand marketing,2022 (04): 24-26. [4] J. Wei, et al. A study on visual expression of regional culture [J]. 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