Borrowing place brands: product branding from SMEs in the publishing industry

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically test how company size affects the use of Scotland's place brand in product branding by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the book industry in Scotland. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a mixed-method approach to investigate place brand adoption for product branding by SMEs in the Scottish book industry through the analysis of Scotland's place brand identifiers in a corpus of 208 online book blurbs. Findings Results from the analysis show that, amongst SMEs in the Scottish publishing industry, smaller companies are more likely to use Scotland place brand identifiers in product marketing. Originality/value This is the first study to analyze book blurbs from a marketing perspective and it is one of the few articles on product-place co-branding. Additionally, branding in SMEs is a relatively new and uncharted area of research to which this study contributes, and branding in book publishing is also a scarcely researched area, to which this study offers new, empirical data about the relationship between place brands and product brands.