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

包装消费品（CPG）行业构成了美国国内经济的很大一部分。令人惊讶的是，这些行业的国家品牌的市场份额和质量认知在美国当地地理市场上差异很大，即使这些品牌具有非常相似的产品特征。尽管对理解消费品行业的竞争和制造商的行为至关重要，但这一现象的基础此前尚未得到深入研究。本研究计划包含三个相关的研究，旨在研究民族消费品品牌绩效的地理差异的起源和稳定性。这是通过描述性和结构性计量经济学建模方法的结合来完成的，这些方法使用了从美国50个主要城市收集的超市的销售、价格和营销数据。该计划将提供衡量地方品牌对全国竞争影响的措施。这项工作的意义将超越是什么导致了这种变化的直接问题。对监管机构而言，地方数据显示的制造商垄断程度不同于全国数据。此外，更好地理解CPG行业的“本土品牌”也应该有助于推进其他行业的这一过程的研究。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，以汇总一个广泛的CPG数据库，该数据库将很快广泛提供。

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.