Channel Structures
Assessing the Effectiveness of Channel Structures, Global Advertising Campaigns and Sales Promotions on Profitability
The synchronization of channel structures, global brand management and advertising campaigns, and sales promotion all must be continually strengthened over time for companies to stay on course to their objectives. Best pr5actices in multichannel management in both B2C and B2B contexts is predicate don keeping these three attributes coordinated, tightly integrated and moving together towards a common objective (Bellin, 2006). The intent of this paper is to evaluate which factors most influence channel structures and strategies of global markets, define how global brands and advertising campaigns benefit a company, and define the role of sales promotion in the marketing mix, analyzing how they vary between industrial and consumer products.
Introduction
Of the many factors that influence channel structures and strategies that are available to global marketers, the most prevalent are those that have to do with customer relationships and the formation of trust (Karray, 2011). This pervades all other factors, as companies must move away from being entirely focused on designing their distribution channels to only accomplish transactions, and instead concentrate on creating long-standing relationships with customers. A secondary factor that influences channel structures and strategies are global brand advertising campaigns, an area analyzed and discussed (Bengtsson, Bardhi, Venkatraman, 2010). A third factor is the role of sales promotion in the marketing mix, and how that specific strategy varies between consumer and industrial products and services, further making channel structures and strategies more unique (Dogan, 2010).
Attaining Profitability Through Channel Management, Brand and Marketing Mix Integration
Distribution channel structures and strategies must stay in step with branding, advertising and sales promotion strategies if all three are to contribute to higher level of sales and profitability (Yoo, Lee, 2011). Of these three areas however, channel structures and strategies are the most specific...
They are also the one area of advertising, branding and marketing strategies that have the greatest need for continual knowledge updates, including support from product management, marketing, product strategies, and services marketing in both B2C and B2B markets (Wang, Chen, Wu, 2011). Another key factor that significantly affects the channel structure and strategy performance is the depth of insight a given comp[any has of their customer's buying process, who the key members of the evaluation process are, and how they choose to evaluate products over the long-term (Yoo, Lee, 2011). This is one of the more critical factors that influence the demand for B2B-oriented products and services, as the purchasing cycle is very long typically, and also requires intensive in-account coordination to be done well. A fourth factor is the pervasive use of technology to create a greater level of collaboration and communication across the many different members and groups of a given distribution channel, uniting it with the supply chain it is reliant on for effectively fulfilling product demands over time (Karray, 2011). Both B2C and B2B distribution channels need to have a pervasive level of collaboration and communication to ensure their respective supply chains can fulfill product and service demand over time. In that sense, the demand visibility that must be present in a distribution channels' structure to allow it to stay coordinated to its supply chain is critical and essential for profitability to attained over the long-term (Karray, 2011).
The contributory effects of global brands and global advertising serve to create much higher levels of awareness, intention and action towards trying a product or service, and advertising campaigns are the basis of these communications goals being achieved (Bengtsson, Bardhi, Venkatraman, 2010). Global branding and advertising campaigns need to take into account their accumulative contribution to the growth of the company, its pipeline, and the quantified results of specific sales promotion and product trial initiatives as well (Kim, 2010). The fact that…
