Under the ecological label policy: Supply chain Heterogeneous product innovation strategies for green marketing

Under the trend of low-carbon development in global scale, manufacturing enterprises that seek low-carbon transition are looking for innovations in green supply chain system. To explore how the green products innovation type, retailers green marketing and government intervention policy collaboratively impact environmental performance, a differentiated game model combining decision optimization and comparative analysis methods has been constructed in this study. The impact of retailer green marketing on supply chain profits and environmental performance as well as the impact of government ecological label policy on retailers green marketing are also extensively evaluated. The results of the model simulations show that green marketing and ecological labeling policies have a synergistic effect in boosting product greenness for development intensive green products (DIGP) innovation, but may not necessarily improve manufacturers' profits and overall social welfare. For marginal cost intensive green products (MIGP) innovation, green marketing alone has no sensible impact on product greenness, but together with implementation of ecological labeling policies, they may motivate retailers to invest in higher marketing efforts, which results in greater economic profits and product greenness, as well as better social welfare. If ecological labeling policy is combined with government subsidy and market price transfer mechanism, for both MIGP and DIGP innovation, corporate green marketing leads to higher economical and environmental value of product chain. However, overall social welfare may diminish, and this negative correlation becomes more significant with further implementation of government eco-label policy.