The role of marketing effort in supply chain management

The focus of this dissertation is to study the role of marketing effort in supply chain management. This research consists of three essays each addressing a supply chain with specific structure and managerial concerns. The first essay studies the issue of coordinating a supply-chain where a manufacturer relies on a sales agent for exerting appropriate marketing effort to increase sales. The cost information for the sales agent's marketing effort is private. These impose challenges to the manufacturer in its endeavor to influence the agent's marketing effort provisions and to allocate profit between the two parties. We propose two contract forms and show they perform differently, and each party's preference toward a particular contract form is linked with the total reservation profit level and/or the sales agent's cost type. We provide managerial guidelines for the manufacturer for selecting a better contract form under different conditions.; The second essay studies the complications of multi-channel marketing in which one powerful retailer dominates the market, and other retailers in the competitive fringe are price followers. The two types of retailers are asymmetric in buying power, retailing cost and the ability to service the manufacturer's product. Our analysis is primarily on how such a channel can be coordinated and how the dominant retailer's "channel flow diversion" type of gray market activities can be prevented. We found that revenue-sharing contracts can serve both purposes.; The third essay studies the role of marketing effort in combating/Managing grey market activities in an international marketing setting. Multinational companies selling their undifferentiated products to different countries at different prices may create a problem for themselves. A low price in one country may encourage an enterprise to transship the products to another country with higher price, creating a new channel of parallel imports that compete with the authorized channels there. The managerial insights derived from this study are of great importance to practitioners. We can view the grey market phenomenon as a distorted version of multi-channel (or mixed channel) marketing. Our results surprisingly complement findings in mixed channel marketing.