来源国形象、消费者偏见与中国品牌跨国营销——中国电子产品在美国的品牌来源国效应检验

来源国效应对一国产品的海外销售产生着重要影响。本文以在美国销售的中国H公司运动手表作为被试商品,在606份有效样本基础上,通过多元线性回归验证了中国品牌电子产品在美国的来源国效应。通过与其他七个国家进行对比,本文发现,虽然中国在美国消费者心目中的产品国家形象较为正面,但相对中国经济地位和产品质量而言,美国消费者对中国电子产品和中国品牌的“来源国偏见”普遍存在,“Made in China”目前仍是中国品牌在美国营销的不利因素。在以往研究的基础上,本文将来源国效应中的产品国家形象划分为整体绩效形象、整体制度形象和产品类属形象,在此基础上检验了多个消费者因素对来源国效应的调节作用,首次检验了消费者网购依赖度对消费者购买倾向的影响,并且发现消费者产品知识负向调节来源国效应,这一结论可以导出明确的管理启示。本文结论进一步深化了来源国效应相关研究,弥补了发展中国家逆向拓展发达国家市场时来源国效应研究的不足。     

TV advertising spillovers and demand for private labels: the case of carbonated soft drinks

The expansion of private labels, or store brands, has transformed consumer choice sets and competition in retail markets, prompting manufacturers to fight back with renewed pricing and product and promotion strategies to forestall further private label expansion. This article examines the spillover effects of television advertising on brand-level consumer demand for carbonated soft drinks (CSDs), including private labels, using a random coefficients logit model with household purchasing and advertising viewing Nielsen data. As in previous work, we find that although brand spillover effects significantly increase demand for CSD brands in the same company and undermine demand facing other manufacturers’ CSD brands, surprisingly, there are positive spillover effects on the demand for private label brands. This indicates that brand advertising is persuasive with respect to manufacturers’ brands but complementary with respect to private labels. Further results show that eliminating television advertising for CSDs would lower aggregate CSD sales as consumers migrate to other beverages, although private labels stand to gain, particularly Wal-Mart brands.     

Consumption Externalities,Coordination, and Advertising*

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that advertising can have an important function in markets with consumption externalities apart from its persuasive and informative roles. We show that advertising may function as a device to coordinate consumer expectations of the purchasing decisions of other consumers in markets with consumption externalities. The implications of advertising as a coordinating device are examined in the pricing and advertising decisions of firms interacting strategically. Although, at times, the one‐period advertising expense can exceed the one‐period monopoly profit, in equilibrium, consumers will pay a premium for the more heavily advertised brand.     

How do advertised brands benefit from private labels? An application of rational expectations models

Private labels have traditionally been viewed as a threat to advertised brands. Contrary to traditional wisdom, this study uses a two-asset rational expectations model to show that advertised brands could benefit from private labels. While the manufacturer’s advertising creates product differentiation, the retailer’s synchronous pricing strategy further enhances the product differentiation and raises profits as well as the efficiency of price discounts for the advertised brand. In addition, the existence of private labels improves the advertising efficiency, especially for newly introduced brands. The economic role of private labels is not limited to taking a free ride on the manufacturer’s advertising efforts, and this role cannot be replaced by another advertised brand.     

WELFARE ENHANCING COORDINATION IN CONSUMER COOPERATIVES UNDER MIXED OLIGOPOLY

The recent globalization of world economies has led the retail markets of developed countries towards increasing levels of integration and strategic interdependence. A non negligible share of retail and food markets is currently served by co‐operative societies. Consistently with this trend, the consumer cooperatives have recently experienced increasing levels of integration. The main aim of this paper is to study the welfare effects of coordination among consumer cooperatives competing in quantities in a mixed oligopoly against profit‐maximizing firms. We show that, in absence of agency problems, under increasing or constant returns to scale a higher output coordination of the consumer cooperatives does not affect the total welfare as long as a nonnegative profit constraint holds in these firms. On the other hand, under decreasing returns to scale, the consumer cooperatives contribute more to social welfare when acting on behalf of all consumers. This is because, by coordinating consumers’ preferences, these firms can reduce their market output, thus helping the market to come closer to the first best. All together these results seem to provide an argument in favour of the recent process of integration involving consumer cooperatives in many developed countries.     

Product customization

The advent of the Internet has revolutionized the way companies advertise, develop and distribute products. Firms can now customize their advertising messages and products to the particular characteristics and needs of customers. Customers themselves can create their own products. We investigate investments by firms in product-customization capabilities within a duopoly model of horizontal product differentiation. We find that (i) if brand name effects are not too strong, one firm emerges as a leader in product customization—firms make asymmetric investments in product-customization technologies in order to reduce price competition, (ii) if brand name effects are strong, both firms make extensive investments in product customization, and (iii) the possibility of product customization can raise industry profits if brand names are weak, but not when they are strong.     

Competition and confidentiality: Signaling quality in a duopoly when there is universal private information

We model non-cooperative signaling by two firms that compete over a continuum of consumers, assuming each consumer has private information about the intensity of her preferences for the firms' respective products and each firm has private information about its own product's quality. We characterize a symmetric separating equilibrium in which each firm's price reveals its respective product quality. We show that the equilibrium prices, the difference between those prices, the associated outputs, and profits are all increasing functions of the ex ante probability of high safety. If horizontal product differentiation is sufficiently great then equilibrium prices and profits are higher under incomplete information about quality than if quality were commonly known. Thus, while signaling imposes a distortionary loss on a monopolist using price to signal quality, duopolists may benefit from the distortion as it can reduce competition. Finally, average quality is lower since signaling quality redistributes demand towards low-quality firms.     

Entry and market selection of firms: A laboratory study

We study how markets adjust to the entry of new firms under different conditions. Two incumbents face entry by three other firms. When firms’ costs are equal, entry always leads consumer surplus and profits to their equilibrium levels. When entrants are more efficient than incumbents, entry leads consumer surplus to equilibrium. With cost asymmetries, market behavior is satisfactory from the consumers’ standpoint but does not yield adequate signals to other potential entrants. Simultaneous entry is in the short run more favorable to consumers than sequential entry. A longer incumbency phase favors consumers after entry.     

The strategic nature of advertising in segmented markets

We develop a simple model in which firm-specific advertising has cooperative and predatory effects. Our model is set in a static market where firms are naturally segmented into two distinct submarkets: several large firms located in the core, with small firms operating as a fringe. We test the net effect of opposing market size (cooperative) and market share (predatory) effects of both fringe and core firm advertising on the advertising decisions of large firms in several US consumer industries. Empirically, fringe firm advertising leads to an increase in advertising efforts by large firms, implying strategic complementarity. On the other hand, increased advertising by core firms in an industry decreases advertising expenditures of other core firms, indicating they are strategic substitutes. Our findings imply that equilibrium levels of advertising can be greater with asymmetric, rather than symmetric, strategic interactions.     

Price Competition and Consumer Externalities in a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly with Information Disparities

In this paper, we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to consider information disparities about quality differences and their effects on price competition. If uninformed consumers overestimate vertical differentiation, asymmetric information is a source of market power and informed consumers exert positive externalities on high quality product purchasers and negative externalities on low quality product purchasers. Such a result is consistent with the fact that information undermines brand. If uninformed consumers are skeptical, adverse selection issues arise and market demands may be perfectly inelastic to prices. With elastic demands equilibrium prices may be either distorted downwards or reflect real quality if the share of informed consumers is suffciently high. Therefore, with skeptical consumers firms may want either to signal quality or subsidize information provision.     

Fashion’s Effect on Consumer’s Preference Formation

Abstract:

It is widely known that all principles of economics textbooks do not consider advertising much less fashion a demand determinant factor. Fashion’s effect on consumer choice is a critically important topic to the understanding of consumer behavior and decision-making in the “new economy.” The discussion of such issues includes verifying the effect of three important fashion market features on consumer preference formation and choice, namely the length of product life cycle, demand volatility, and impulse purchasing. It seems that time has come to concede that fashion firms, especially those producing fast or “junk” fashion, if you will, have successfully been affecting consumer preferences and have manipulated consumer choices for the sake of their own interests. Such a goal has been achieved by exploiting the fashion market features by employing specific marketing strategies, within the framework of supply chain agility, such as product remodeling, product customization, and revisions or innovation.     

A MARKET WITH A SOCIAL CONSUMPTION EXTERNALITY*

We model a spatial market in which the utility of each consumer is affected by the consumers who buy precisely the same product. The marginal contribution of consumers x's purchase on consumer y depends on |x–y|, which declines as |x–y| increases. Such modelling of preferences fits goods that signal a consumer's place in society—clothing styles, automobiles and jewellry are examples. For 2n + 1 firms we find the unique symmetric equilibrium and derive comparative statics on the optimal number of firms, the largest number of firms the market can support, and the behaviour of profits per firm as n increases.     

品牌体验、信任与满意

本文探讨了消费者品牌体验对消费者品牌满意的影响,同时探讨了消费者品牌体验各维度之间的关系。品牌信任在消费者品牌体验对消费者品牌满意的影响中起中介作用。本文采用了结构方程模型。建议企业多增加品牌体验的措施以增加消费者的品牌体验,从而提升消费者对品牌的满意度。     

基于绿色营销的消费者品牌偏好变化影响因素的实证研究——以食品、家用电器为例

从绿色营销与消费者心理与行为交叉研究层面选取了消费者品牌偏好变化的视角,侧重对消费者在绿色营销的影响下出现的＂绿色＂品牌偏好变化现象进行实证研究。通过问卷调查表对影响消费者偏好的内部特征因素和外部环境因素进行了统计描述性分析,并选取绿色营销较为成熟的食品和家电行业为研究对象,对消费者绿色品牌偏好变化特征进行数据收集及实证分析,从而为企业在绿色营销活动中依据消费者品牌偏好变化趋势有效细分市场、选择目标市场、确定产品定位以及制定营销组合策略等提供依据。     

Consumer search markets with costly revisits

This paper characterizes equilibrium outcomes in consumer search markets taking the cost of going back to stores already searched explicitly into account. We show that the optimal sequential search rule under costly revisits is very different from the traditional reservation price rule in that it is non-stationary and not independent of previously sampled prices. We explore the implications of costly revisits on market equilibrium in two celebrated search models. In the Wolinsky model, some consumers search beyond the first firm. In this class of models, costly revisits do make a substantive difference and their impact can be of the same order of magnitude as the initial search cost. In the Stahl oligopoly search model where consumers do not search beyond the first firm, there remains a unique symmetric equilibrium that has firms use pricing strategies that are identical to the perfect recall case.     

恶俗广告——广告塑造品牌过程中的主要问题剖析

广告为很多品牌的塑造立下了汗马功劳,但广告在塑造品牌的实际运作中存在很多方面的问题,恶俗广告就是其中最典型的。恶俗广告在无形中将产品的品牌形象打入了万丈深渊。企业在品牌的塑造中,广告应审时度势,以优秀的广告为品牌树立良好的形象。     

Ordered search with asymmetric product design

Two firms sell horizontally differentiated products on a platform; one product has generic design, whereas the other has polarized design. Consumers search sequentially for products and prices. We show that there always exists an equilibrium where firms correctly expect consumers to first search the product with polarized design. If the platform is able to choose a search order for consumers, generally it lets consumers search the product with polarized design first. The polarized–generic ordering can be achieved using a generalized English auction when product designs cannot be observed by the platform.     

Product availabilty as a strategic variable: The implications of regulating retailer stockouts

We study product availability as a strategic variable in a sequential game between consumers and a monopolist. We use a perfect Bayesian equilibrium concept to solve the game under different regulatory regimes. We show that under certain assumptions about the regulatory environment, a two-price equilibrium in which the quantity of the lower-priced good is limited may exist even when a single retailer sells two brands that are perfect substitutes. The FTC Guides Against Bait Advertising are shown to be potentially welfare enhancing as they facilitate commitment on the part of a monopolist credibly to plan for stockouts. Paradoxically, our analysis suggests that the more stringent FTC regulation prohibiting stockouts by retail food stores from 1971 to 1988 was Pareto worsening, as it removed the monopolist's commitment mechanism.