Influence of technology on regional brands in Czechia

Abstract

This article aims to examine the effects of new technology on the purchase of regional brands in Czechia and draw conclusions that will help to adapt the brands to customer needs. Regional brands are a speciality of Central Europe, which emerged due to consumer dissatisfaction with low-quality of global retail products. These traditional local handmade products are heavily influenced by new technology and customers requiring them to be purchasable online with a massive online presence. The sample consisted of 1050 residents of the Czech Republic. The data were gathered by a professional marketing agency Ipsos using a questionnaire survey. The sample was tested using the one-way Chi-square test, which had good compliance to test the basic sample characteristics, followed with the one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to test the data distribution, and then, the dependencies were tested with the Kruskal-Wallis test. Finally, a post-hoc test suitable for the type of analysis could be chosen to better understand the type of factors that could influence the results and their possible effect. The main findings indicate a slow change in the demand as customers are neutral in relation to regional brands available from online shops as well as their about social media presence but require them to have a good-quality website. Solutions are proposed using a government-run brand with a platform providing web layouts and hybrid e-shop. The type of content is proposed, indicating the appropriate execution, which should be done based on the researched-derived segmentation criteria.