Can cultural symbols of goods influence marketing? Evidence from China’s Duan ink stone industry

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of cultural symbols on marketing by using survey data from the China’s Duan ink stone industry. The empirical regression results show that cultural symbols have a significant positive impact on marketing. In heterogeneity analysis, group characteristics of producers, such as education level and years of experience, can also influence the relationship between cultural symbols and marketing. We also utilize the conditional mixed process (CMP) method and instrumental variables (IV) to address the endogeneity of the model. The contribution of our study is that we provide a new research perspective to study the role of cultural symbols in marketing from the production side and provide new data and industry samples for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural symbols
• marketing
• Duan ink stone

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L81
• M31
• Z10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Members of the Guangdong Duan ink stone industry association include more than 90% Duan ink stone enterprises, it suitable for random sampling.

² We measured the education level of the respondents, from junior high school to postgraduate.

³ We have divided the price of a duan ink stone into five intervals from 1500 RMB to 7500 RMB, assigned values 1–5.

⁴ The number of sales employees.

⁵ Corresponding question ‘whether sales are concentrated in Guangdong province’.

⁶ Corresponding question”whether the engraving machines have been used”.

⁷ The number of apprentices.

⁸ Corresponding question ‘whether to take network sales’.

⁹ Corresponding question ‘whether to join industry associations’.

¹⁰ Corresponding question ‘whether to have participated in government welfare training’.

¹¹ The two-stage regression may be affected by the two-way causality between the independent and dependent variables or correlation of random error term, these disturbances can be avoided by adopting the CMP approach.

¹² Corresponding question ‘Which stone do you choose when you make a Duan ink stone?’. There are four main types of stone used in the manufacture of Duan ink stone, the variable is assigned the values 1–4.

¹³ It can be seen that the auxiliary estimated parameter atanhrho is 0.331 significantly different from 0. This indicates that there is a significant correlation between the two equations. The explanatory variable is endogenous and more efficiently estimated by the CMP method.

¹⁴ Corresponding question ‘Whether to use Lingnan cultural symbolic images to make Duan ink stones’, Variable is binary variable.

¹⁵ We divide the average annual revenue of the enterprises from RMB 40,000 to RMB 100,000 into 6 intervals and assignment 1–6, the variable is still ordered data.