制造商竞争环境下基于要素品牌战略的动态合作广告研究

Dynamic cooperative advertising with competitive manufacturers based on ingredient branding strategy

在要素品牌战略背景下,本文研究要素供应商和最终产品制造商之间的动态合作广告策略。制造商在其产品及广告中融入供应商的要素品牌,供应商承担制造商的部分广告成本,并直接对终端客户做广告推广其要素品牌。论文分别考虑了“单供应商-单制造商”和“单供应商-两个广告竞争的制造商”两种情形,采用最优控制的方法,得到了两种情形下供应商的最优广告参与率及广告努力水平,以及制造商的最优广告努力水平。研究发现,实施要素品牌战略促使渠道成员投入更多广告,提升渠道成员的商誉水平和利润水平;适度的广告竞争有助于系统总体性能的提高。通过数值分析,进一步讨论了广告竞争强度的影响。

Ingredient Branding Strategy is the brand management activity aimed at promoting ingredient branding through the brand promotion of the final product. To encourage the manufacturer to integrate ingredient branding of the supplier in its final product and advertisement, the ingredient supplier absorbs the advertising cost for the manufacturer. In the same time, the supplier also advertises directly to the consumers. Now the strategy has become an effective brand marketing strategy. The strategy helps both suppliers and manufacturers to establish brand advantages and enhance consumers’ perceived quality of ingredient brands and final products, as well as creating consumer demands. With the success of enterprises such as Intel and Dolby, ingredient branding strategy has attracted the attention of marketers and scholars. However, the problem of cooperative advertising decision-making, which has not been fully researched, is still the main challenge faced by business practice of the Ingredient Branding Strategy. It’s thus necessary and worthwhile to investigate the problem to provide clear guidance for business decisions of supply chain participants. Based on the extended Nerlove-Arrow advertising goodwill model, this paper constructs a dynamic model to discuss the cooperative advertising strategy based on Ingredient Branding Strategy in two different situations:(1) single supplier-single manufacturer, and (2) single supplier-two manufacturers existing advertising competition. If the supplier and the manufacturers play a Stackelberg game, the supplier determines the advertising participation rate at first, and then manufacturers and the supplier decide their optimal advertising effort level simultaneously in order to maximize the present values of their profit. Using the differential game approach, we establish the Present Value Hamilton Equation to solve the dynamic optimization problem in the two cases, and thus obtain each member’s optimal strategy and the corresponding steady state goodwill levels. First, we study the situation of single supplier-single manufacturer to analyze the influence of Ingredient Branding Strategy on optimal decisions and benefits of supply chain members. It is found that Ingredient Branding Strategy can motivate the manufacturer and supplier to increase advertising investment and make the manufacturer get higher advertisement subsidies, which is conducive to improving each member's brand awareness. Then based on the situation of single manufacturer, this paper discusses the influence of advertising competition between two manufacturers on the implementation of Ingredient Branding Strategy and on enterprise performances. It is indicated that the supplier is willing to pay part of the advertising cost for the manufacturer only if its marginal profit exceeds a certain threshold. The threshold is related to the system parameters and the manufacturer's advertisement competition intensity. In addition, the advertising effort level of the supplier is not affected by the direct advertising competition among manufacturers, and the supplier is more likely to cooperate with multiple manufacturers to promote ingredient branding and invest more in advertising. Moreover, the optimal advertising participation rate is positively related to the supplier’s marginal profit while negatively related to the manufacturer’s marginal profit and the participation rate has a correlation with parameters of the competing manufacturers. Interestingly, the competition among manufacturers boosts the advertising investment of each channel members. Also, proper competition is beneficial to manufacturers, which increases the amount and possibility of the advertising costs borne by the supplier, compared to the situation of single manufacturer. Finally, the numerical example is given to further explain that proper advertising competition among the manufacturers and why they increase the advertisement effort, the advertising subsidies, the goodwill level and the profit. In summary, each channel members acquire more benefits from both the appropriate advertising competition between the manufacturers and the implementation of Ingredient Branding Strategy.