Research On It Industry's Marketing Channel

4The most important decision the management faces is the marketing-channel decision and all the other marketing decisions would be influenced directly by the channels which the company chose. Company's pricing strategy is determined by that whether the company takes advantage of large-sized and high-quality dealers or it cooperates with medium-sized and medium-quality dealers. Company's promotion force and advertising strategy are determined by the training programme and encouragement for the dealers. For the individual IT corporations which have a lot of distributing activities as well as the certain markets served by them, distributing system is one of the key resources existing outside.This thesis demonstrates the IT industry's characteristic, market situation, problems and the future trend. Faced with complicated market environment, especially the fierce competition and challenge of fast-developing IT technology, how to use the conception of ecological marketing, how to make use of company's advantage and features while avoiding being hampered by the disadvantage, how to organize and coordinate the marketing activities according to the market requirements while stressing the creative design and management of distributing system and regarding the distributing system as core-competing power, all above are the subjects the channel-centered IT corporations are studying and analyzing closely. The most popular types of IT industry are agency and chain-store which feature the vertical tree-liked structure and horizontal net-liked structure. With the case-study of Furi Co.'s mobile PC sales channel strategy and An's(China) Lingxin Firewall System distributing strategy, this thesis emphasizes that when enterprises are making decision about the sales channel, many factors should be taken into account, including market environment, product's different life-periods,inenterprise's advantages and competence of agency. The proper decision is likely to be made and the leading competition position is achieved after the examination and analysis of enterprise's advantage and disadvantage and market's opportunity and threat have been done.Being the channel-centered marketing organization in IT industry, enterprise should create sales-channel strategy suitable to the competition environment based on the analysis of the channel-environment and factors which influence channel strategy. With the assessment of channel's length and width and research on factors of market, products and enterprise as well as intermediate dealers, channel's goal is made clear and rational marketing channels are designed and channel's responsibility is allocated among the members of channel. After that, enterprises need establish sound channel policy including product policy, price policy, promotion policy and brand policy to provide theoretical foundation for the control and management of sales channel. Therefore effective management would be applied to the potential conflicts in sales-channel and to the competition between the incompatible and unclear tasks and duties and between the feeling difference and high reliability.