Concentration of marketing channels and brand-level retailer margins: evidence from Japan

This article investigates the impacts of marketing channel concentration at each distributive channel stage on brand level retailer gross margins. A unique official Japanese dataset, the National Survey of Prices - which reports brand level wholesale prices as well as retail prices of national brand items in various consumer product categories - enables us to estimate the retail margin directly for each specified brand. The most notable conclusion is that an inverse relationship is found between brand level retailer margins and the degree of wholesaler concentration, which is consistent with empirical results in previous marketing and economic studies that investigated the impacts of manufacturer concentration on category level retailer margins.