Dynamic cooperative advertising strategy in OAO supply chain with customer return

Abstract

Nowadays many manufacturers are increasingly adopting their own online direct channel and the offline retail channel to sell their products as the quick development of e-commerce and third party logistics. To gain more and more market share, the manufacturer and the retailer implement unconditional return strategy, which does not affect secondary sales. We build a differential game model for the optimal advertising and the optimal advertising cost sharing proportion for centralized and decentralized OAO (Online and Offline) supply chain considering customer returns rates. We further analyze how the returns rates affect the optimal decisions of the manufacturer and the retailer. The results show that the returns rates, the brand reputation and the influence factors of retail channel goodwill on demand of online direct channel strongly influence the optimal advertising decisions. Furthermore, the retailer does not support for the manufacturer advertising efforts in Stackelberg game. Compared with the centralized OAO supply chain, the decentralized system results in channel inefficiency. To coordinate the channels, we design a two-way advertising cost-sharing contract. By this contract, each member of the supply chain reaches a win-win situation and is willing to cooperate. Numerical studies verify the conclusions of this paper.