The Road to “Brand Power”: A Quasi-natural Experiment of National Trademark Brand Strategy

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that “high-quality development is the primary task of building a socialist modern country in an all-round way”, and made new important arrangements for promoting “quality power”. “Powerful brand” is the core connotation of high-quality development. “Powerful Quality” is a realistic path for China to promote a strong and resilient national economic cycle system and accelerate the construction of a new development pattern in the new era. However, the quantitative evaluation of the implementation effect of the national trademark brand strategy demonstration policy is still extremely scarce. Based on the large sample data of the trademark office of the state intellectual property office of China, this paper applies the quasi-natural experimental methods of DID and DDD to evaluate the impact of the national trademark strategy on the trademark registration behavior of enterprises. It is found that the implementation of the national trademark strategy significantly increases the number of trademark registrations in the experimental group. Furthermore, the dynamic marginal effect shows that the policy effect shows time lag and persistence. The above results remain robust after the effectiveness tests such as parallel trend test, controlling ex ante time trend and excluding expected effects, as well as the robustness tests such as counterfactual test, excluding other policy interference, adopting different matching methods and changing the clustering level of standard error. From the perspective of heterogeneity analysis, the policy effect of trademark brand strategy is significantly affected by the regional business environment, which is more obvious in the samples with high degree of regional marketization and low degree of resource mismatch. The mechanism test shows that the trademark brand strategy policy can promote the trademark brand construction by strengthening external promotion, strengthening intellectual property protection and promoting facilitation of trademark application. In the context of the “Brand China” strategy, this paper enriches the literature on the brand upgrading effect caused by the regional development planning with Chinese characteristics, and provides policy basis for promoting the transformation of “China Made” to “Chinese Brand”, leading the upgrading of the supply and demand structure, and accelerating the construction of a unified national market.