دانلود رایگان مقاله تاثیر معرفی برند فروشگاه در رهبری قیمت کانال

Abstract

In this study, we conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of store brand introductions on the price leadership relations in a distribution channel between a retailer and national brand manufacturers. We analyze a multi-product category retail database from a major grocery chain, which captures both a period before and a period after the introduction of a store brand in each product category. By applying the time series approach to this data set, we show that store brand introductions frequently lead to price leadership changes, generally in a more favorable direction for the retailer than for the national brand manufacturer, evidenced by either the decay of the manufacturers’ price leadership or the rise of the retailer’s price leadership. However, such a change is not universal but tends to be concentrated among a certain quality tier of national brands, which is not always the low-tier, but sometimes the top-tier despite the low-price low-quality position of the store brand. The patterns detected in the data suggest that these changes are likely to reflect the retailer’s strategic effort to reshape the price leadership environment in a product category aided by the enhanced bargaining power and managerial sophistication that accompanied the store brand introductions.

Directions for Future Research

For marketing academics, our study challenges the assumption of the stability of channel price leadership (which typically sees manufacturers as the price leaders), which has been made in previous theoretical or empirical research on SB-related issues. In addition, our empirical findings suggest the retailer often engages in different leader–follower relationships across multiple NB manufacturers within the category, both before and after SB introductions. This is in contrast to the typical theoretical channel models assuming a uniform leadership scenario across competing manufacturers, and points to the need for more rigorous studies on asymmetric price leadership structures in future research. We hope some of those future studies will seek deeper theoretical insights into the key determinants of the retailer’s strategic choices regarding channel price leadership after SB introductions. Our study focuses on reporting an interesting empirical phenomenon with some plausible explanations, but falls short of providing clear theoretical understanding of the underlying factors that need to be investigated in future studies. Our empirical analysis is also limited by the data including four product categories from one grocery chain. Expanding the analysis to other product categories and other retailers will enhance the generalizability of the results. In particular, our analysis was limited to the situation where SB was introduced as the lowest-priced brand in the category. Given the growing trend of increasing SB quality and marketing a line of multiple SBs within a product category, the investigation of the channel price leadership issue within a model reflecting such realities will be interesting. In addition, simultaneous consideration of the retailer’s strategic decisions over SB positioning and channel price leadership might lead to new strategic recommendations based upon deeper understanding of the interaction between these two topics that have been studied in separation.