On the Local Nature of National Brands in Consumer Packaged Goods Industries

消费包装商品(CPG)行业构成了美国国内经济的一个很大部分。令人惊讶的是，这些行业的国家品牌在美国当地地理市场的市场份额和质量认知存在很大差异，即使这些品牌具有非常相似的产品特征。虽然对理解CPG行业的竞争和制造商的行为至关重要，但这种现象的基础以前还没有深入研究过。本研究项目包含三项相关研究，旨在研究国家CPG品牌绩效的地理差异的来源和稳定性。这是通过描述性和结构性计量经济学建模方法的组合来实现的，使用从美国50个主要城市的超市收集的销售、价格和营销数据。该计划将提供衡量地方品牌对国家竞争力影响的指标。这项工作的影响将超越直接的问题，即是什么导致了这种差异。对监管者来说，地方数据表明，制造商的垄断程度与国家数据所显示的不同。此外，更好地了解中央人民政府行业的“本土品牌”，也将有助于推动其他行业对此类过程的研究。最后，该项目将以数据处理脚本的形式为其他研究人员提供资源，以汇集即将广泛使用的广泛的CPG数据库。

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries form a large sector of the domestic U.S. economy. Surprisingly, the national brands in these industries have market shares and quality perceptions that vary substantially across local U.S. geographic markets even when the brands have very similar product characteristics. Although central to understanding competition in CPG industries and the conduct of manufacturers, the underpinnings of this phenomenon have not been studied in depth before. This research program contains three related studies aimed at studying the origins and stability of geographic variation in the performance of national CPG brands. This is done through a combination of descriptive and structural econometric modeling approaches using sales, price, and marketing data from supermarkets collected across 50 major U.S. cities. The program will provide measures of the effects of local branding on national competition. The work will have implications beyond the immediate question of what accounts for the variation. For regulators, the local data suggest different degrees of monopoly power by manufacturers than suggested by national data. Also, a better understanding of "local branding" in CPG industries should help advance study of such processes in other industries also. Finally, the project will yield a resource for other researchers in the form of data-processing scripts to aggregate an extensive CPG database that will soon be widely available.