Sustainable Decision Making for Store Brand Product

We investigate a multi-brands sustainable channel coordination problem where a national brand manufacturer sells a product through two local retailers competing against their own store brand product, respectively. We shows how the retailers strategically optimize the price and quality of private brands given the customer tastes and the production costs of the store brands in order to make their store brands sustainable. We identify two underlying strategic forces; a competitive force, and a quality force. First, we find that retailers have an incentive to position their store brand far away from the national brand in order to maximize monopolistic power. This strategic force attenuate the incentives for customer to switch to other retailer’s store brands. One the other hand, we show that the retailers prefer increasing the store brand’s quality to get more profit margin when the production cost is relatively high as well.