Impact of Trade Protectionism on Firm’s Brand Strategy: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

EasyChair Preprint 4469, version 2

Abstract

The shadow of trade protectionism is hanging over the growth of world economy, affecting both developed and emerging economies. Motivated by anti-globalization rhetoric policymakers in the emerging and transitioning countries are increasingly using trade protectionism and other restrictive measures to shield domestic producers from foreign competition and strengthen own countries’ position in the global trade. Obviously, such interventions have impact on marketing strategies of firms domiciled and hosted in such markets. However, firm’s marketing and brand responses to trade protectionism have not been studied in the prior marketing literature. We aim to address this gap in two empirical studies, which utilize food embargo (as trade protectionist action) imposed by Russian government in 2014 as context of our study. For the first study, we surveyed marketing managers of 178 Russian and international brands and assessed differences in dimensions of brand strategy. We find that owners of the domestic umbrella brands put more emphasize on brand orientation, differentiation, and creation strong image than firms owning foreign brands. Alternatively, brand strategy of the foreign individual product brands focuses more on communicating functional benefits. The second study will adopt natural experiment design and use secondary data (trademark filings, financial information, and consumer attitudinal data) to measure impact of trade protectionism on brand differentiation and extension in a large sample of domestic and foreign firms/brands.

Keyphrases: Brand Differentiation, Brand Image, Brand orientation, brand awareness, brand strategy, emerging economy, emerging market, firm brand strategy, global brand, natural experiment, protectionism, trade barriers

@booklet{EasyChair:4469,
  author    = {Vera Rebiazina and Alexander Krasnikov and Olga Kusraeva},
  title     = {Impact of Trade Protectionism on Firm’s Brand Strategy: Evidence from an Emerging Economy},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 4469},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}