1 Introduction
1.1 Research Context
Hebei Province, a major provincial - level region in terms of both population and traditional labor export, serves as a crucial area for the coordinated development of the Beijing - Tianjin - Hebei region. It boasts a large number of provincial and municipal-level labor service brands, covering multiple fields such as home economics, manufacturing, construction, and food processing. Well-known labor service brands in the home economics service category include “Hebei Fushao”. In the manufacturing category, there are “Wu'an Steel Workers” and “Jinzhou Textile Workers”, etc. In the construction category, brands like “Xiongan Longhua Decoration Engineers” and “Zhengding Carpenters” exist. And in the food processing category, “Hebei Dairy Workers” and “Jinshahe Noodle-making Workers” are among them.
However, the construction of labor service brands faces threefold structural contradictions. First, there is a lack of brand symbols, as most labor service brands do not have unified visual identities. Second, there is a quality gap, with only a small number of brands having established specialized skill specifications. Third, there is a mismatch between production and demand. The intelligent construction needs of the Xiongan New Area do not correspond to traditional labor skills. At the same time, the industrial structure upgrading in Hebei Province (such as the intelligent construction in the Xiongan New Area) has put forward higher requirements for labor skills. However, the existing labor service brands have an insufficient degree of matching with industrial demands, resulting in a structural contradiction between labor supply and industrial upgrading [1].
From a national perspective, the construction of labor service brands has shifted from the stage of scale expansion to that of quality improvement. The national “14th Five-Year Plan” clearly proposes to “cultivate several well-known labor service brands”. Nevertheless, at the regional level, there is still a lack of a systematic theoretical framework and empirical support for quality improvement.
Competition in the labor market has shifted from quantity and scale to quality and brands. Labor service brands have gradually become a booster for the labor service economy and can well enhance the quality of workers. As a crucial node for the coordinated development of the labor force in the Beijing - Tianjin - Hebei region, the quality improvement of labor service brands in Hebei Province is not only related to local employment and income increase but also involves the overall situation of the coordinated development of the regional economy[2]. Therefore, exploring the path for improving the quality of labor service brands in line with regional characteristics is of urgent practical need.
1.2 Literature Review
A labor service brand is also a type of brand. It is an extension of aproduct brand. In the construction and promotion of a labor service brand, the theories and research results of product brands can also be applied. The core lies in the differentiated identification of workers' skills [3].
A labor service brand is a market mark formed by regional labor forces through occupational characteristics and needs to possess skill professionalism and group reputation [4]. For the research on labor service brands, it is necessary to reflect their inheritance from product brands and regional brands, while also emphasizing their uniqueness [5].
A labor service brand has the quality, reputation, and cultural characteristics of a product brand. Additionally, it has its uniqueness. Workers need to have professional skills, communication skills, cooperation skills, a highly conscientious and responsible work attitude, as well as basic elements in interpersonal communication such as integrity and good manners.
The carrier of a labor service brand is the workers themselves. Therefore, labor service brands have uniqueness and complexity different from ordinary commodities. Labor services are generally intangible, and purchasers usually cannot see, smell, taste, or feel them in advance. Labor services have quality differences. Quality difference means that services are non-standard and unstable. The components and quality levels of services often change, and it is difficult to uniformly define them. Precisely because of this, the design of labor service products must maintain the due quality and strive for consistency.
Labor services are similar to ordinary products in brand building. Both need to find distinctive brand elements that purchasers need, and need to be positioned, and the brand elements need to be beautified and designed, and integrated marketing communication needs to be carried out. The construction of a labor service brand needs to be oriented towards purchasers' needs. Labor service products need to have core values, need to have personalized identification symbols, and also need a stable supply of human resources. Labor services generally originate from a certain industry in a certain region, so the development maturity of related industries in the region where the labor service is located has an important impact on the local labor service.
A labor service brand needs to be built according to the unique cultural endowments, industrial development, and human resources of a certain region and can be shared by workers in the region [6].
For the construction of a labor service brand, first, it is necessary to have a certain scale of labor service output; second, the skill training for labor service personnel needs to be strengthened; third, actively shape the image of the labor service brand[7]; fourth, attach importance to the promotion and publicity of the labor service brand; fifth, the long - term support and investment from government departments.
To build a labor service brand, measures can be taken from eight aspects: first, overall planning by the government; second, innovate training methods; third, implement targeted training; fourth, combine vocational training with skill appraisal; fifth, unblock the channels for the output of the labor service brand; sixth, complete the construction of the labor market[8]; seventh, guide and cultivate labor service intermediary institutions and rural labor brokers; eighth, increase the intensity of the publicity of the labor service brand.
A labor service brand is a regional brand and has the nature of a public product. The management subjects of a labor service brand include the government, industry associations, training institutions, leading enterprises, etc. To prevent phenomena such as “free-riding” and “tragedy of the commons”, the government needs to regulate, support, and guide the formation and operation of labor service brands. Stakeholders such as industry associations, training institutions, and intermediary institutions play important roles. Government departments need to coordinate all parties to participate together and play their auxiliary roles. Only through the promulgation of laws and regulations and effective administrative management can the government coordinate stakeholders to jointly build labor service brands.
1.3 Literature Gaps
Existing research focuses on the leading role of the government, the industrial environment, and the design of brand elements, yet it overlooks the psychological mechanisms of buyers. For instance, how “perceived brand value” translates policy stimuli into quality improvement remains underexplored. Most of the existing research results discuss the connotation of labor service brands and summarize the development stage processes of certain successful labor service brands, lacking theoretical depth. Previous studies mostly examine the success experiences of a single specific labor service brand and then generalize the strategies that various brand management subjects should adopt. Existing research often uses training scale and employment numbers as brand quality indicators, failing to incorporate buyers’ attitudes. This easily leads to a disconnect between policies and market demands; for example, the quantity of labor services may increase, but the employment rate may not improve.
Whether the quality of a labor service brand is good or not requires buyers to make evaluations cognitively and emotionally. Currently, there is limited research on the psychological activity process of buyers under the stimulation of labor service brands. This is precisely the core logic of labor service brand construction. Therefore, identifying the psychological change mechanisms of buyers that need to be followed to build high-quality labor service brands is a research gap. The initial stimulus sources of labor service brands that buyers receive include brand symbols, incentive policies of brand management subjects, and stimuli from the industrial environment. However, the relative contribution of these stimuli is unclear.
1.4 Research Motivation and Innovation Points
The importance of labor service brand construction in the labor service field is increasingly rising, yet there are still several important gaps in existing research. Currently, it is necessary to clarify the mechanism of buyers’ psychological activities under the influence of different stimulus sources. It is necessary to define the extent of the impact of different stimulus sources on buyers’ psychological activities. There is also a need to clarify the subtle psychological process by which buyers form brand quality evaluations after perceiving brand value. At present, empirical research in this regard in the labor service brand field is quite limited.
Therefore, this study takes the SOR model as the basic framework, regards brand symbols, industrial maturity, and brand manager incentives as stimulus sources, observes their impact on buyers perceived brand value, and the mechanism by which they further form brand quality through influencing perceived brand value.
The innovation points of this study are as follows: it empirically tests the SOR psychological path (external stimuli → perceived brand value → brand quality) in the formation of labor service brand quality, quantifies the differential contributions of brand symbols, industrial maturity, and brand management subject incentives to the formation of brand quality; and based on the analysis of mediating effects, proposes precise governance countermeasures for labor service brands in Hebei Province.
Currently, with the rapid development of big data technology, data acquisition is gradually becoming easier [9], and the technology is gradually maturing [10]. This provides an important foundation for data analysis. If there is a large amount of data on the development of labor services and industries, and through data analysis, brand managers can formulate differentiated incentive policies, which can promote the higher-quality development of labor service brands [11]. Based on this, this study proposes a “Big Data-based Three-Dimensional Precision Governance Framework”.
2 Research Hypotheses and Model Construction
2.1 Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Theory
The SOR theory was proposed by environmental psychologists Mehrabian and Russell in 1974. Its connotation is that when an individual is exposed to a stimulus (Stimulus), there is a psychological processing process within the individual (Organism), including perception, cognition, emotion, motivation, etc. After the individual psychologically processes the stimulus, they will exhibit attitude changes or explicit behaviors (Response), such as evaluation, approach, avoidance, purchase decisions, etc.
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CRediT authorship contribution statement
First author: Writing-original draft, Supervision, Investigation. Second author: review & editing, Data curation, Conceptualization. Third author: Validation, Supervision.Fourth Author: Validation.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the 2024 annual Shijiazhuang Social Science Experts Cultivation Program (Grant No. 2024zjpy 70), the 2024 Annual Hebei Province Human Resources and Social Security Research Project (Grant No. JRSHZ-2024-02079)