Research On Composite Bundling Strategy Of Products And Services Considering Service Characteristics

With the gradual rise of service consumption,more and more enterprises sell their products by bundling some related services.For customers,the bundling strategy enables customers to purchase both products and services at the same time with the advantage of price discounts.For the enterprise,the enterprise increases the sales of the service while selling the product,extracts the customer's surplus to the maximum extent and gains more profits from it.Traditional bundling strategies are mostly limited to products and mainly analyzed from the basic principles of bundling strategies,while ignoring the impact of adding service characteristics on bundling strategies.Due to the complexity of service characteristics in different market environments,enterprises tend to integrate other marketing strategies while bundling sales.How to redesign and price this composite bundling strategy is a brand new problem for enterprises.Based on the classical product bundling strategy,this paper summarizes the relevant literature in the field of bundled sales at home and abroad under the macroscopical background of the rapid development of service industry.Focusing on the manifestation of service characteristics under different scenarios,this paper aims at sequential introduction,quality differentiation,quality variability and demand uncertainty in the product-service bundling.According to the temporal logic,this paper studies four stages in the bundling sales of introduction,advance selling,current sale and return,then four kinds of composite bundling strategies such as intertemporal bundling,differentiated bundling,probabilistic bundling and mandatory bundling are proposed respectively.The mathematical model is established to solve the design and pricing problems in bundling sales of products and services.Numerical experiments give an analysis of the impact of various market factors and provide the managerial insights for the purchase of customers and the production of enterprises.This paper summarizes the following research works:(1)In the introduction stage of bundling sales,aiming at the sequential introduction of service.the intertemporal bundling of products and services is proposed.When bundling and individual sales of products and services are sold in the same market,the leader firm and the follower firm should consider the introduction sequences and the pricing strategies of the bundling and individual sales.This paper establishes a leader-follower game model to solve the problem of sequential introduction of bundling and individual sales and gives two-stage pricing strategies under the competition of market share.Under the two types of introduction strategies,that is,pure bundling first and individual sales first,the firms adopt the uniform pricing,penetration pricing and skimming pricing according to the bundling discount and marginal product cost.In addition,the paper also considers partial mixed bundling,and compares the pricing strategies between partial mixed bundling first and individual sales first.(2)In the advance selling stage of bundling sales,aiming at the quality differentiation of service,the differentiated bundling of products and services is proposed.A firm bundles a base product with an add-on service in the advance period,while the base product and another differentiated add-on service are sold individually in the spot period.Based on the future uncertainties of strategic customers in the service quality or their own consumption states,this paper establishes a two-period model to study the optimal pricing strategy in advance bundling.In two scenarios of the base product bundled with high-quality or low-quality add-on service,the optimal advance price and the optimal spot price are solved,and the influence of customer valuation,customer number and cost factor on the two-stage pricing strategy is analyzed.On this basis,this paper also extends to the pricing strategy of selling only base products in the spot period.(3)In the current sale stage of bundling sales,aiming at the quality variability of service,the probabilistic bundling of products and services is proposed.There is always an uncertain quality-level of service in the e-commerce market,which affects the bundling of products and services purchased by heterogeneous customers,so only the upper bound,lower bound or range of quality of service is guaranteed in the firm's sales.Using linear interpolation in analytical modeling,this paper considers the existence of quality variability of service in the bundling or individual sales of products and services respectively,and solves the optimal bundling price and the optimal individual sale price.Depending on the quality variability of service,bundling discounts divide the market into three types of bundling markets.Based on the numerical experiments with simulation data and real data,this paper analyzes the sensitivity of cost sensitivity,product quality and service quality variability.(4)In the return stage of bundling sales,aiming at the demand uncertainty of service,the mandatory bundling of products and services is proposed.More and more firms are beginning to bundle their products with core services mandatorily.However,it is very inconvenient for customers to individually return the products or refund the core services.In this paper,under the premise of uncertainty of demand,a dual-channel supply chain model considering product returns and core service refunds is established.Customers can return the default bundles directly in the direct channel,while in the retail channel customers first return the product to the retailer and unsubscribe from the diverse core services,and then the retailer returns the individual product to the upstream manufacturer.This paper uses an approximate algorithm to solve the optimal product quantity,and analyzes the impact of the return rate of direct channels,return rate of retail channels and profit margins on product quantity and profit.