Impact of promised-delivery-time and brand image on imported vaccine provider’s agency marketing strategy

Abstract

To ensure the imported vaccines’ high quality, many countries such as Canada, the UK and China require the imported vaccine provider to cooperate with an exclusive domestic agent for vaccine sales. In this paper, we examine the role of promised-deliver-time (PDT) for the transport of vaccines in the imported vaccine provider’s agent selection: It can either rely on a non-competitive domestic agent (referred to as Pure Agent Marketing Strategy) or a rival domestic agent (referred to as Rival Agent Marketing Strategy) that produces and sells its self-branded vaccines. PDT is made by the logistics service provider (LSP), which helps keep the high quality of the imported vaccines but also significantly constrains the delivery volume. This further alters the imported vaccine provider’s agency marketing strategy. Interestingly, we find that the Rival Agent Marketing Strategy is not necessarily harmful for the imported vaccine provider, especially when the imported vaccine’s brand image advantage is significant and the PDT is long. We further study the impact of the brand substitutability and the imported vaccine provider’s social responsibility, finding that the main results are qualitatively unchanged.

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