Brand Equity Analysis Among Producers Of Chinese Mitten Crab

The Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis is a special aquatic product in China. In thepast few decades, the Chinese mitten crab has become one of the most popular aquaticproducts. Not only is the demand growing quickly but also the share in the aquatic marketis increasing steadily. At the same time, the Chinese mitten crab producers have begun toexport their products to other countries in Asia. In the Shanghai area of China there isconsiderable product differentiation among producers of Chinese mitten crab Eriocheirsinensis, with as many as50brands available in the marketplace. At the same time, thebrand awareness of each brand is quite different. For different producers, besides thecultivation methods, there are also many other factors that affect the production,distribution and marketing process. These influence the yield, quality and crab size directlywhile affecting consumer preference and price indirectly. Moreover, there are factors in theretail and brand maintenance processes which influence consumer preference and pricedirectly and indirectly as well.For every Chinese mitten crab producer, the objective function, net revenuemaximization, is presumed to be identical, but their observed profitability is totallydifferent, even on a per kilogram basis. Thus the overall and detailed economic conditionsof each type of Chinese mitten crab brand need to be analyzed first. Then, we need to findan efficient method to measure brand equity and suggest how to improve brand equity.These are the central issues that are investigated in this thesis. Data for the study wascollected from mitten crab producers on prices, yields, size distributions, costs, and anumber of other variables that may serve as proxies for production technologies andmarketing efforts. Firstly, the key factors in dataset should be analysis, then the cost benefitanalysis and risk analysis were both used to show the overall and detailed economic situations of different types of brands. Net Revenue Premium was chosen as the appropriatemeasure for estimating brand equity.The cost benefit analysis results showed that all Chinese mitten crab producers, nomatter which category their brand belongs to, are operating under favorable economicconditions, since their Benefit Cost Ratios (BCRs) are much larger than one. The BCR ofwell-known brands is the largest one among the three categories, meaning that this kind offirm exhibits strong profitability and can make more benefits from investing their capital.Similarly, less-known and unknown brands also have good earning potential because theirBCRs are much higher than1.0.The risk analysis results showed that, after running the simulation process with1000iterations, the highest net return to management of less-known brands is lower than thelowest net return to management of well-known brands and there is no overlap betweenthese two types of brands. This means that if the producers have a choice to make a changein brand type, all producers would like to be a member of the well-known brands since thenet returns to management of this type will be much higher.The appropriate measure chosen for the estimate of which factors have an impact ondetermining brand equity was net revenue premium. The correlation results showed thatonly one method can be chosen to measure brand equity. However, the net revenue variableincludes all those factors and is thus the best measure of brand equity for the estimationprocess. With brand equity represented by the net revenue premium, the structural modelwas set up using a series of regressions as detailed previously. Thus the final structuralmodel was composed of four separate regression models showing which factors have apositive or negative impact on brand equity.For the Chinese mitten crab producers, the results above will provide some suggestionsfor improving profitability and brand equity. This is valuable for protecting the wholeChinese mitten crab industry, and for consumers it will also bring long-term benefits in theform of higher quality and more reliable supplies.