Recently, building of a “regional brand” has been one of the most important issues in agricultural marketing. This article discusses an application of the images of region for building brands of agricultural products. For this purpose, the author takes “Kyoto-niku” an instance of a “regional brand, ” and investigates what ideas the final consumer associates the Kyoto-like food and “Kyoto-niku” with.
This article consists of two parts: (1) the consideration on the building of brands, noting with a concern for using a place-name; and (2) the research on the images to “Kyoto-niku” and Kyoto-like food. The former part pointed out that there could be three types of brands related to agricultural products: (1) the brands of the agricultural products themselves; (2) the brands of the producer groups of agricultural products; and (3) the brands of certain areas. In the interview survey in the latter part, the Repertory Grid Technique (Fransella, Bell, and Bannister, 2003) was used. And the data was processed by the singular value method (a classical multi dimensional scaling), and examined by cluster analysis.
As a result of the analysis, the images that the respondents of the research associate the Kyotolike foods with were classified into two main clusters: (1) the representative Kyoto-like foods; and (2) the foods that were familiar to them in their daily life. With this result, the author attempted to interpret on how the marketing strategy could be done to link “Kyoto-niku” with each cluster. These steps mentioned above could offer a practical suggestion for building various “regional brands” better than by a traditional analysis of the price differentials.

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