Advertising games on national brand and store brand in a dual-channel supply chain

Abstract

This paper investigates a dual-channel supply chain, where one national brand manufacturer has both online and retail channels. The retailer is assumed to sell the national brand as well as his store brand to customers. The following five scenarios are considered: Centralized case, Stackelbergmanufacturer (SM) game, Stackelberg-retailer (SR) game, Nash-manufacturer (NM) game and Nash-retailer (NR) game. The paper derives the conditions under which the supply chain members would like to participate in cooperative advertising. The results show that in the Stackelberg games, the leader in Stackelberg game will reduce its investment in cooperative advertising when it gets a lower marginal profit from the cooperative advertising; In addition, the dual-channel supply chain can get a higher profit if it is dominated by the member whose marginal profit from cooperative advertising is higher. In the Nash games, in order to increase the whole supply chain's profit, the member who has a higher marginal profit in the cooperative advertising should give up the decision power on cost-sharing rate voluntarily. In addition, if there exists a leader in the supply chain, the cooperative advertising will be higher. Furthermore, the introduction of store brand will trigger the manufacturers antipathy for the low profit.