Research On Innovation And Integration Of Marketing Channel Patterns

The Change in economics, technologies, competition and culture have exertedgreat impacts on traditional marketing channel models and structures, propelling thechannel innovation and development in the changing environment. In today'smarketplaces, globalization of competition and rapid technology evolution makevirtually every product become commodity. The importance of product-baseddifferentiation as the primary source of competitive advantage has decreases inpower. Facing with ever-increasing choices of products, today's customers becomeless brand loyalty, more sophisticated and mature than ever before. Theineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional channel operations in new economyera are noticed and recognized by companies and make them turn their attention tochannel improvement by creating and utilizing new channel formats to offer newways to deliver their products and associated seamless service to customers. Thefast development of telecommunication, Internet and other sophisticatedtechnologies make channel innovation and integration possible and feasible. Manynewer channel technologies such as e-commerce channels and telechannels(callcenter) open up new options and provide companies with a wide range ofalternatives for crafting and implementing a new kind of competitive advantage: achannel advantage. In some sense, channel innovation and integration will be animportant strategic issue for local many companies from all industries to competeand sustain in global community in the 21st century.The article divides into five parts totally. The chapter one is introduction,including the research intention and background. The second chapter has introducedthe basic theory of the channel to summarize the function, feature and the basicconcept of marketing channel. The following is the key part of the paper. The thirdchapter has narrated the traditional channel pattern and its evolution and themarketing channel pattern of Chinese enterprises. The patterns include traditionalpattern, vertical channel pattern, horizontal channel pattern and multi-channelpattern. The case introduced the channel pattern of Chinese domestic appliance. Thefourth chapter narrates the innovation pattern of marketing channel, andsummarizes the direct channel, co-operational channel, call center and Internetchannel pattern. The fifth part discusses the method for marketing channel patterninnovation, which is called integration management. The marketing channelintegration management includes strategy management, customer servicemanagement and distributor management. The integration methods are integrationwith traditional channel, integration with call center channel and integration withInternet channel.