Channel members play significant roles in the marketing process by ensuring that products or services get to the consumer as expected (Ballou, 2007). They include agents, brokers, retailers, wholesalers and industrial distributors and add value to the process of marketing in several ways including the following.
- Cost and Time Effective
Channel members are experienced and knowledgeable in their field of performance. The advantage allows them to create efficient and insightful strategies for distribution that saves the time used and the cost incurred during the entire process. For example, retailers collect products from different suppliers and deliver them to the customers under one roof instead of shifting from one producer to the other which is costly and consumes a lot of time.
- Enhance Sales Of Products And Services Through Promotion
As they distribute products or services, channel members apply unique and effective promoting strategies in the endeavor to attract as many consumers as possible. The approaches enhance the brands’ awareness at the market; thus, increasing the sales as more customers is mobilized to purchase these products or services.
- Enhance Customer-Business Relationship
Channel members make direct contacts with the consumers and can identify their loyalty and the best strategies to apply to ensure the existing ones are maintained, and others draw closer to the business. It is easy to create and maintain a substantial relationship with the customers when one is aware of their needs and preferences of which enhances the competitive advantage of the business.
- Provision Of Essential Information
For a business to be in a better position to outdo its rivals in the market, one has to know the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Hence, the members of the channel can gather relevant information about competitors of which allows the supplying company to make the right decisions regarding the best marketing strategies to utilize.
Channel members utilize various technological inventions such as the internet to save costs of distribution. They use websites such as e-commerce to promote and sell products and services to a wide range of consumers (Kotler, 2006). By doing this, goods are delivered to the customers in the right quantities, and unnecessary and unfruitful trips are avoided reducing the costs incurred. For instance, manual marketing might require the distributor to move from one place to another implying that extra expenses such as fuel have to be involved. The additional costs can be reduced if the distributor is only required to move to deliver a customer’s order.
References
Ballou, R. H. (2007). The evolution and future of logistics and supply chain management. European business review, 19(4), 332-348.
Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2006). Marketing Management.
