Multi-channel Marketing Decisions Based On Consumers’ Shopping Preferences

Before the birth of e-commerce,enterprises mainly rely on offline retailers and agent to sell their products.After its emerging,some companies began to try all kinds of direct sales model,including:(1)the self-built official website mall,(2)the official flagship store on the third-party platform,like Tmall.In fact,the development of e-commerce also provides tremendous opportunities for many retailers.Some of them,subjected to the increasing offline cost,are trying to set up a shop on taobao or other third-party platform.At this point,manufacturing enterprises can not only utilize traditional channels to meet consumer demand,but also adopt the online direct or retail channels to promote and sell products.Although the increasing sale channels can help enterprises to improve brand and market,it brings a lot of troubles for enterprises’ management.Firstly,the establishment of online channels brings a great of pressures to offline channels.Secondly,the establishment of direct channels affects indirect channels seriously.So in a multi-channels sale structure,how do these participants compete with each other? And how do consumers make their final decisions when they can buy a good in different channels? Moreover,are these direct channels really good for enterprises sale.These problems are the key points that business circles and academia recently concerns and discusses.In order to solve these problems,we firstly,based on china’s e-commerce development,summarize various sale channels and sales model adopted by enterprises at different times.Secondly,we abstract some specific issues,and establish the conceptual models and mathematical models of the enterprise sales system.Thirdly,consumers are divided into two groups: the online group consumers in which accept online shopping,and the offline group consumers in which just accept offline shopping.Then we analyze consumer behaviors and decisions based on the basis of the utility model.Fourthly,based on consumers’ shopping decisions,we analyze the mutual game among manufacturers and retailers.Finally,we verify and summarizes the final conclusion by example analysis.After a series of analysis and calculation,the main conclusions in this paper are: In dual-retail sale system,the game between two retailers has the Nash equilibrium,and the game between manufacturer and retailers has the Stackelberg equilibrium.At the same time,the proportion of online consumers and their evaluation to a online product will influence the managers’ decisions in the competition.After the official website mall and the official flagship store are introduced consequently,the sale system of a manufacturing enterprise begins to contain three and four channels.In these occasions,it’s not always true that the game among a manufacturer and retailers has a balanced solution.Finally,we find although adopting official website mall can help a manufacture enterprise to increase his profit,it affects the offline retailers’ benefits severely.Setting up the flagship store on the third party platform can benefits the manufacture enterprise,but further reduces the online retailer’s sales and profits.The above conclusions will have an important significance for manufacturing enterprises,no matter whether they have established direct channels or haven’t.On the one hand,to make these enterprises who haven’t established direct channels evaluate these channels objectively,this paper compares a manufacturer’s and retailers’ profits,pricing and sales before and after establishing a official website mall and a flagship store.On the other hand,to help these enterprises who have established direct channels to make correct strategies,this paper analyzes the equilibrium decision of the game between a manufacturer and retailers.Moreover,this paper also provides a reference for researches on multi-channel competition and consumer behavior in the future.