Boosting Agribusinesses with Brands during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Agribusiness is one of the major forces in global economic devel­opment. Since the 1980s, diversification has been seen by agribusiness as one of the right strategies to improve and increase its status, but the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of agribusiness. In this new context, companies have capitalized on the marketing dimension, shaping their iden­tity to transfer and add value, especially to end consumers. The brand is an intangible bridge that strengthens entrepreneurial capital. The paper aims to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the main players in the agribusiness industry, taking into account marketing performance indicators such as turnover, rating and brand value before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploratory research was performed based on the analysis of sec­ondary data. Given the annual agribusiness reports, the first ten agribusiness­es were generated and analyzed using the rankings on turnover, profit and brands developed by Forbes, Brand Finance and Interbrand. The research clas­sified agribusiness taking into account the market they addressed: B2B, B2C, or mixed formula. Only Nestlé is present in all the rankings. From the rating point of view, the pandemic generated by the new Coronavirus did not pro­duce notable implications on the brand of the big players in the international agribusiness. For Romanian agribusinesses, Transavia, Cris-Tim, Vel Pitar are in the top ten in terms of turnover and brand value. The study emphasizes the complementarity of analyzes and the interdependence between them.