The Potential of Tag-Based Contextualization Mechanisms to Leverage the Sale of Regional Products and Promote the Regions Through Products

In small and rural regions, where we can many times find top quality products, there is, many times, a greater difficulty in promoting their products. This difficulty begins in the nature of the companies that manufacture these products. These companies are typically family-owned or small-sized, not having large capacity to carry out very elaborate marketing strategies. They often depend of the tourist attractiveness of the regions themselves to leverage their sales. This paper discuss the challenges for the promotion of regional products and rural regions, review the role of smartphones and the main tag-based contextualization mechanisms and their potential for leverage the sale of rural regional products and, finally, presents a cooperation-based conceptual model, where are combined contextualization-tags and mobile devices to promote regional products, leverage sales and promote rural regions by attracting new visitants, making regional products a window-mechanism to the promotion of rural regions heritage and tourism-related services.