In this article, the authors study the role of a store brand in building store loyalty through a game theoretic analysis. In a market in which a segment of consumers is sensitive to product quality and consumers' brand choice in low-involvement packaged goods categories is characterized by inertia, the authors show that quality store brands can be an instrument for retailers to generate store differentiation, store loyalty, and store profitability, even when the store brand does not have a margin advantage over the national brand. In addition, this loyalty argument does not apply for the “cheap and nasty” private label strategy. Such a private label policy, on the contrary, reinforces rather than reduces price competition among stores. Indeed, the quality of the store brand must be above a threshold level to create this opportunity. It also follows that quality store brands, when carried by competing retailers, can be an implicit coordination mechanism that enables all the retailers to become more profitable. Finally, a quality store brand policy is profitable only if a significant portion of shoppers buys the national brand. This surprising result establishes the complementary roles of store brands and national brands. The former create store differentiation and loyalty, whereas the latter enable the retailer to raise prices and increase store profitability. The authors provide empirical support for their thesis by using evidence from Europe and household-level scanner panel data from the United States and Canada.

A theory of salesforce compensation plans is presented where the sales of a product depend not only on the salesperson's effort but also on the uncertainty in the selling environment. The firm chooses a compensation plan to maximize its profit taking into account the salesperson's likely effort levels under alternative compensation plans and his or her alternative job opportunities. The salesperson (agent) chooses an effort level considering both the disutility from effort and the expected utility from earnings under the compensation plan. The Agency Theory framework provides an explanation for the differences across firms in the types of compensation plans used such as straight salary, straight commissions, or a combination of salary and commissions. It is shown that the optimal compensation plan is a convex (concave) increasing function of sales if the risk tolerance of the salesperson increases “rapidly” (stays constant) with income. We identify several structural parameters that affect the compensation plan and show that the implication of changes in some of these parameters is consistent with those mentioned in the sales management literature. For example, we show that the proportion of salary to total compensation would increase with an increase in one or more of the following parameters: (i) uncertainty, (ii) marginal cost of production, and (iii) attractiveness of alternative job opportunities for the salesperson. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the theory for managing salesforce compensation plans.salesforce compensation, agency theory, salary and commission plans, salesforce management

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This paper analyzes the role played by brand loyalty in determining optimal price promotional strategies used by firms in a competitive setting. (Loyalty is operationalized as the minimum price differential needed before consumers who prefer one brand switch to another brand.) Our objective is to examine how loyalties toward the competing brands influence whether or not firms would use price promotions in a product category. We also examine how loyalty differences lead to variations in the depth and frequency with which price discounts are offered across brands in the same product category. The analysis predicts that a brand's likelihood of using price promotions increases with an increase in the number of competing brands in a product category. In the context of a market in which a brand with a large brand loyalty competes with a brand with a low brand loyalty, it is shown that in equilibrium, the stronger brand (i.e., the brand with the larger loyalty) promotes less frequently than the weaker brand. The results suggest that the weaker brand gains more from price promotions. The analysis helps us understand discounting patterns in markets where store brands, weak national brands, or newly introduced national brands compete against strong, well known, national brands. The findings are based on the unique perfect equilibrium in a finitely repeated game. The predictions of the model are compared with the data on 27 different product categories. The data are consistent with the main findings of the model.marketing: competitive strategy, pricing, promotion, games: noncooperative

Conventional wisdom seems to claim that, by lowering the cost of distribution and by making search easier for consumer, the introduction of the Internet is likely to intensify price competition. This paper intends to challenge this view by asking: When and how is the Internet likely to decrease the level of price competition between firms? To answer this question, we develop an analytic model with the following characteristics. On the demand side, consumers need to gather information on two types of product attributes: (which can be communicated on the Web at very low cost) and (for which physical inspection of the product is necessary). Consumers choose between two brands but are familiar with the nondigital attributes of only the brand purchased on the last purchase occasion. On the supply side, firms use traditional stores and the Internet to inform consumers about their products' attributes and to sell their products. In this setup, we show that the impact of the Internet on competition will be radically different depending on the relative importance of parameters describing the relevant shopping and distribution context. Specifically, we find that the introduction of the Internet might lead to monopoly pricing when (1) the proportion of Internet users is high enough, (2) when nondigital attributes are relevant but not overwhelming, (3) when consumers have a more favorable prior about the brand they currently own, and (4) when the purchase situation can be characterized by “destination shopping”. More surprising, we also show that in such cases, the use of the Internet not only leads to higher prices but can also discourage consumers from engaging in search. As such, an important message of the paper is that under some conditions the Internet might represent an opportunity for firms to leverage their brand loyalty and increase their profits. The intuition behind our results is the following. The Internet allows consumers to evaluate digital attributes easily, i.e., without visiting the stores. However, nondigital attributes can only be evaluated through physical presence. As such, for goods where both types of attributes are important, the introduction of the Net changes the effective cost of search for consumers. Without the Internet the cost of search is . With the introduction of the Net however, nonsearching consumers do not have to undertake the shopping trip at all because they can order products on the Net. Thus, in the presence of the Internet the cost of search is related to . In the case of destination shopping (i.e. when the fixed cost of undertaking the shopping trip is higher than the cost of visiting an additional store), the presence of the Internet creates higher effective search costs for consumers. Given this shift of paradigm in search costs due to the Internet, consumers may not take the risk of searching for products with better nondigital attributes, but instead, remain with the product they are familiar with. This results in increased consumer loyalty, which induces firms to increase th...