Marketing, Distribution Inter organizational Dependence

What is marketing? Marketing is the business activity of presenting products or services in such a way as to make them desirable. It sounds simple but marketing is quite complex, a product or service passes through several steps before it reaches every marketing goal, which is to create profit and at the same time create customer satisfaction. In layman’s term, for the product/service to end up in the hands of the consumers and end-users. A product and service is very important but we as marketers are not concerned on how it was made, we marketers are focused on how we will market the product and service and how we will make them desirable to the consumers.

Marketing deals with several key elements and one of these is distribution and marketing channels. These channels are comprised of organizations that work together trying to achieve mutually acceptable goals, with allotted activities. A channel works very effectively if they understand the importance of Inter-organizational behavior. There are several organizations working under a channel and these organizations have different specialties and fortes. The success of a channel member is wholly dependent on how well its channel is performing. The channel members work together and agree on goals, tasks and roles to be performed by the channel members so that the channel may run efficiently. Disagreements within a firm may cause serious conflicts that may be very harmful to the channel and to the organizations within it.

A channel may run smoothly if the members within it carry out each of their goals, roles and tasks well. How does a channel run smoothly, how do we create a harmonious relationship inside the channel?

First we have to understand that we should not always focus on the needs and wants of the end-users (yes! It is VERY! and EXTREMELY important) but we have to understand that the channel partners are the very essential elements of marketing. These channel partners or resellers are the ones with the closer relationship with the people, they are the front liners and they experience the reaction of the consumers towards a product first hand. In order for the resellers or channel partners to perform well the marketers must achieve their tasks whether the distribution of the products to the resellers and the packaging. The marketers should distribute the products to the resellers on time because if it gets delayed it may cause damage to image of the reseller towards their consumers and it will then damage the relationship with the marketer and reseller. The packaging of the product must be certain and must be well fit for the resellers store because if not it may cause some inconvenience. Another thing is that the product must be really sell-able because resellers are dead-on focus on making profit and if the product is not sell-able then expect that resellers won’t give as much interest to the product. Marketers should educate and inform well the resellers on the products that they are selling for them because resellers may explain more the quality and functions of the product to the consumers and Promotion HELP! Resellers in order for them to sell more they need the promotional help from the marketers in terms of financial support for ads and other promotional gimmicks.

In conclusion the relationship of the marketer with the channel partners is very important and it needs to be well taken care of for the reason that not only for the product to be successful but because with the information revealed between both parties strengthen and enhances their relationship more. This is very important since this would be the start of a plateful of assist with each other since both parties now know the real price of the goods. They should look out and take good care of each other since both of them will benefit from each other.