Channel Strategies and Functions
The convenience (having the product available for consumption when the customer buys it) or speed which a marketer provides to customers.
What is time utility?
Geopolitical risks push companies toward greater fragmentation and diversification of their supply chains while economic turbulence (inflation and tariffs) make it more difficult for firms to manage costs and pricing decisions.
Tech such as AI can improve supply chain operations but workforce challenges arise due to the difficulty in finding skilled, qualified labor.
What are the Supply Chain Management Trends?
Blending different communication and delivery channels that mutually reinforce attracting, retaining, and building relationships with customers who shop in traditional intermediaries and online.
What is Omnichannel marketing?
Companies that sell, rent, or provide goods and services to ultimate consumers for personal, family, or household use.
What are retailers?
The convenience of a location (easy to access) or the prestige of a location (how exclusive it is) that a company provides to consumers.
What is Place Utility
Providing time, dependability, communication, and convenience.
What is customer service?
They are owned by the manufacturer, and they take title and physical possession of the products they distribute.
What are merchant wholesalers?
A legal agreement binds the parties to certain obligations and functions.
What are contractual systems?
Assorting- channel members deliberately decide on the selection of goods the channel offers.
Transporting- can use third-party logistics
Warehousing and Materials housing- can include Cross Docking
Order processing- processing the orders (duh)
Inventory management- JIT or VMI
What are the five logistic functions?
involves products in just a few locations around town.
Involves selling products in just one outlet per geographic territory.
What is intensive, selective, and exclusive distribution?
Wholesalers that look more like sales people; they don't take title of the goods, nor do they take physical possession of them.
What are agents?
A channel member moves down the channel, toward the consumer. (Pepsi purchases its bottlers.)
A channel member moves up the channel toward the manufacturer. Netflix produces its own original series.
What is forward vertical integration and backward vertical integration?
Buying or Selling and Risk Taking (retailers assume risk when they buy products with intention to sell them)
What are the Transactional Functions of a distribution channel?
When a company sells directly to consumers
When a company relies on intermediaries
When a manufacturer bypasses a channel intermediary and sells directly to the customer.
What are direct and indirect channels?
This is the manufacturer-owned equivalent of an agent, as it performs only a sales function and doesn't carry any inventory.
What are manufacturer's sales branch and sales office?
The size and influence of one channel member serves as the basis for achieving coordination between subsequent levels in the marketing channel.
What is an administered system?
Facilitating Functions include these categories:
What is Financing, Product grading, and Market Research?
Uses one firm's marketing channel to sell another firm's products.
What are strategic channel alliances?
performs a variety of marketing channel functions, including selling, stocking, and delivering a full product assortment, as well as financing.
What is an industrial distributor