Managing a brand in the tomato sector: authority and enforcement mechanisms in a collective organization

In agricultural subsectors, collective organizations such as producer groups or second-degree cooperatives frequently cope with management of brand names. The success of these brand names depends upon the ability of actors to collectively create, guarantee and sustain a stream of rents based upon brand reputation. The key issue for these collective organizations will be to create specific coordination mechanisms in order to build and safeguard this reputation. Drawing from a real case in the French tomato sector, the research focus on the governance mechanisms, and especially authority and enforcement mechanisms. We show that the collective organization can be analyzed as a combination of governance mechanisms. These mechanisms are aligned with the main contractual hazards found between actors, and are a mix of individual and collective incentives, of external and internal controls and of authority based upon a delegation of power.