Designing and Presenting a Strategic Model for Development of National Brand in the Food Industry

The concept of brand represents a widely common phenomenon in today's global economy, and the so-called national branding refers to a smart way of trading and creating wealth, making it an important part of the business strategies adopted by developed countries. Despite its great potentials for increased levels of production and export to foreign markets, the Iranian food industry has long been facing numerous challenges due to lack of strong national branding. Accordingly, the present study seeks to address the research gap in this field by following a mixed (qualitative – quantitative) approach where qualitative content analysis and structural equations were used to develop and present a strategic model for the development of national brand in the food industry of the country. In the qualitative part, the statistical population was composed of academic elites and food-industry practitioners, while managers and experts at Tabarok Industrial Manufacturing Group comprised the statistical population for the quantitative part of this study. The required data was collected through library studies, semi-structured deep interviews, and a researcher-constructed closed-ended questionnaire based on Likert scale. The findings indicated that the development of national brand in the food industry is affected by five groups of key factors, namely (1) industry-related factors, (2) key firm-related factors, (3), brand-related factors, (4) government-set policies and supports, and (5) macro environmental factors affecting the national brand. Quantitative findings of the research showed that the developed model exhibited appropriate goodness-of-fit in the first stage.