Marketing Channel Conflict Management: The Impact Of Culture On Channel Communication

No matter researchers on Marketing and Organization or practitioners all stress the importance of Channel Conflict Management. According to the researches of American scholars Thomas and Schmidt et al, conflict management is as important as plan, motivation and decision, or even more important. In practice, marketing channel managers spend more than 20 percent of their time on resolving the vertical channel conflict. Communication can be described as the glue that holds together a channel of distribution. The role of communication within marketing channels is an important issue from both a managerial and a theoretical perspective. The managerial importance stems from the fact that communication difficulties are a prime cause of channel problems. Though the marketing literature acknowledges that communication plays a vital role in channel conflict management, it provides no integrated theory for channel communication. The empirical research on channel communication is sparse. Culture is the fundamental of communication. Different culture results in different communication practices. Therefore, the research question of this article is How to manage channel conflict--What is the impact of culture on channel communication? In order to answer the research question, in the first part of the paper— Introduction, the author stated the research background and the research question firstly. Then, she introduced the history and current situation of the research topic. Last, she explained the outline of the paper. In the second part of the paper—Marketing Channel Conflict, the author described thedefinitions, the types and the causes of marketing channel conflict and discussed how tomanage the marketing channel conflicts.In the third part of the paper—Communication, the author defined the communication first.After that, on the basis of the analysis of the history of communication theories, sheconcluded that the communication theories developed in the intra-organization studies areapplicable to the inter-organizations studies. In the rest part, communication elements,communication directions, communication styles and communication barriers were presented.Finally, she illuminated the relationship between culture and communication.In the fourth part—Culture, the author made it clear the definitions and characteristics ofculture. Then, she introduced the Culture difference index of Hofstede specifically. Next, thedifferences between Chinese culture and Dutch culture are indicated. Last, she analyzed therelationship between organizational culture and national culture.In the fifth part—Channel Communication, the author interpreted the communicationbehaviors from the Power Distance, Individualistic/Collective and Long-term/Short-termorientation dimensions. On the basis of her analyses, she put forward the communicationmodel.In the sixth part—Case studies, the author discussed the communication behaviors of CanalCompany Amsterdam and Guangzhou Houdy in the face of marketing channel conflicts.In the last part—Conclusion, the achievements, limitations and further researches arepresented.