Co-op advertising and pricing models in manufacturer–retailer supply chains

Cooperative (co-op) advertising plays a significant role in marketing programs in conventional supply chains and makes up the majority of promotional budgets in many product lines for both manufacturers and retailers. Nevertheless, most studies to date on co-op advertising have only assumed that the market demand is only influenced by the advertising level but not in any way by the retail price. That is why our work is concerned with co-op advertising and pricing strategies in distribution channels consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer. Four different models are discussed which are based on three non-cooperative games (i.e., Nash, Stackelberg retailer and Stackelberg manufacturer) and one cooperative game. We identify optimal co-op advertising and pricing strategies for both firms mostly analytically but we have to resort to numerical simulations in one case. Comparisons are then made about various outcomes, especially the profits, for all cases. This leads to consider more specifically the cooperation case in which profits are the highest for both the retailer and the manufacturer, and how they should share the extra joint profit achieved by moving to cooperation. We solve this bargain problem using the Nash bargaining model.