Traditional Food Products—Between Place Marketing, Economic Importance and Sustainable Development

The aim of this paper is to link the economic and marketing perspectives by means of the quantitative method to answer the question of whether traditional food products may play an important role in sustainable region development ensuring economic viability, and how (if at all) marketing should support this process. Due to the lack of unambiguous theoretical findings—the theory has not established a model of the impact of regional products on the food sector in the region and, further on, the economy—an atheoretical approach should be applied, which without priori findings (without favouring individual variable) will lead to an assessment of the above-described impact. Using the Bayesian approach, the authors have measured the above relations with respect to the case of Poland. The basis of the study is provided by a database developed by the authors for 16 Polish NUTS2 regions where lists of official traditional food products were compiled. Using the chosen method, a group of explanatory variables has been proposed (among them, a number of regional products) as factors potentially responsible for the dependent variable (value of agriculture production in the NUTS2 regions). The results indicate that the number of traditional food products does not determine the value of agricultural production on the level of the NUTS2 regions in Poland. This value is determined by commodity production rather than the factors of the so-called sustainable agriculture.