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The ability to nurture marketing channel relations is essential to long‐term corporate survival. This study empirically investigates how and why relationships between manufacturers and dealers in the office systems/furniture industry develop and how and why these relationships are maintained. The results demonstrate the benefits of considering the actions and reactions of channel partners when developing tactical and strategic marketing plans. These findings emphasise the importance of mutual dependency, behaviour and financial performance in creating effective working environments.

Dealers positioned at the downstream of the supply chains are those who can directly influence demand scenario for the manufacturer. However, manufacturer has to ensure that the influence is favorable by competitively fulfilling the anticipations of the dealers. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is focused on developing sustainable strategic relationships between manufacturer and dealer.

In this paper, the basic requirements of the dealers expected to be fulfilled by a manufacturer are analyzed by applying fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and fuzzy Quality Function Deployment. The said approach is implemented in a case situation of a paint manufacturing company in India, and the results are analyzed to provide directions for the company to strategically align manufacturer–dealer relationships.

It was found that the case company has to focus mainly on promotions and advertisements, painters meet, and recognition offered to the dealers. Although pricing was also considered as one of the prominent aspects yet through competitive assessment the case company was found to be better off compared to its competitors.

As the results obtained in the current study are specific to a manufacturing environment, they cannot be generalized for all the companies. However, similar approach can be adopted for analyzing the customer requirements in order to achieve dealers’ attractiveness and satisfaction.

The application of proposed approach assists a manufacturer to pursue right strategy to practice for achieving dealer attractiveness and satisfaction. This will definitely help the supply chain managers to have the right requirements of the dealers’ are fulfilled on priority.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a channel incentive program conceptual framework. In order to do so, a consolidated theoretical effort was completed together with observations from two countries – Brazil and the USA – to build evidence toward the proposed framework.

This paper first proposes a theoretical framework for understating marketing channel incentive programs, conceptualizing it as being composed by four dimensions being control, benefits, exclusiveness and formalization, mediated by power distribution between dealers and manufactures. Second, the developed framework was used for a cross-country analysis. Three multinational firms, global leaders in the crop protection industry, were selected in Brazil and the same three were selected in the USA. For completing each case report for the six companies in total, 16 people were interviewed, besides documental research over companies’ documents.

The framework helped describing and understanding the different group of incentives used per firm and country. Indeed, there are much more similarities within Brazil or the USA, than the same company in these two countries. The institutional environment and the network structure were fundamental to understand why the power center was different in these two countries that resulted in different channel incentive programs. In the USA, programs are very clear and straightforward in regard to a powerful dealer. If the dealer develops five or six output tasks, margins would increase considerably. In Brazil, however, dealers have a wider array of activities accompanying output measures. If they perform well they receive support, but fundamentally manufacturers strongly influence dealers’ daily management decisions.

The incentive programs analyzed are mostly based on the set of standard documents manufacturers produced for dealers and on interviews for clarifying the content of the documents. Therefore, manufacturers probably set some relationship aspects aside since “individual approaches” to dealers might exist that were not captured in this study. Another limitation is the application to one sole industry that may per se present particularities that could be inducted too far the conceptual model that was built.

The framework as suggested might first help to organize the thinking of first identifying the power distribution between manufacturer and dealers and understanding institutional and network underlying causes. The framework might then help to select the right performance measures, benefits while keeping exclusivity and formalization levels in mind. Several types of control measures and benefits are presented as examples that can be adapted to a particular situation. Special concerns should be considered when managing marketing channels with incentives in an emerging market, but mainly, one must recognize the need to identify resources limitations (financial, knowledge, or infrastructure). Second, institutions work quite inefficiently, which means that beyond legal enforcements, firms may rely heavily on additional coordination mechanisms such as incentives schemes and communication strategy to build a more social and bilateral control mechanism. Third, a manufacturer should recognize that even if they currently hold a less-dependent position to dealers, the dynamics of an emerging market may quickly change the dependence structure.

The paper brings together a literature review and consolidation over the topic of channel incentive programs, proposes a framework to be used by researchers or practioners and dive in three pairs of companies in different countries to analyze why management practice should be adjusted. Differences in developing and developed countries are highlighted and the impact on channel incentives.

The case illustrates how environmental forces affect an industry’s profitability. PESTEL and five forces analyses can be used to examine the retail agricultural equipment industry.

Single case study.

Jonathan Sullivan has a decision to make. His company is struggling due to difficult industry conditions. He is questioning if the company can continue to survive. MEC is an agricultural equipment dealer. The industry has experienced boom-and-bust periods since the company was founded. But the current downturn seems different. The past five years have been difficult as manufacturers have changed their dealership practices. Jonathan has struggled with some of the new practices the manufacturers have implemented. These new practices could negatively impact the company’s ability to survive. Jonathan wonders, “What is the best path forward for the business?”

The case is designed to be used in an undergraduate strategic management course.

Solutions provision depends on effective and efficient supply chains. Existing discourse within servitization has remained at the organisational or inter-organisational level with a limited emphasis on the role of individuals. However, supply chains are not just relationships between organisations, they are complex, inter-personal relationships that span organisational boundaries. The limited focus on boundary spanners and their interactions means that managerial roles critical for the provision of solutions remain unidentified. The purpose of this paper is to identify the functions, roles and practices of boundary spanners that connect organisations and enable the effective provision of solutions.

A case study comprising 61 interviews in 11 firms was conducted in the UK network of a commercial vehicles manufacturer, to investigate boundary spanning for product and solutions provision.

The functions of boundary spanners move from communicating product and price features in product provision towards strategic communication, dissonance reduction, professional education, consultation and leveraging offerings in solutions provision. The study also identifies the boundary spanning roles and practices that form these functions for solutions provision.

This is the first study in servitization that identifies and describes the boundary spanning functions, roles and practices. By adopting the lens of boundary spanning, the research addresses the lack of empirical managerial-level enquiry within servitization research. It extends the theoretical discussion on the differences between supply chain management in servitized vs product contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and information technology a sense of how the automobile industry uses the internet to market its products.

A review of the applied literature on practices and actual examples of companies' practices (obtained through personal interviews and basic empirical analysis of managers located in Pittsburgh, PA) was conducted. An analysis of data derived from web‐enabled and highly educated professionals from the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh, PA, resulted in 60 interviews from an initial sample of over 155 professionals from three area firms. Techniques reviewed include online advertising, data mining from web sites, other conventional advertising of the company web site and positioning their vehicles among the various search engines.

The statistical findings lead to the general conclusion that people are using the internet with greater regularity to gain information about vehicle purchases. However, the vast majority of those surveyed still preferred to ultimately complete the purchase in person.

The findings show that while dealers are forced to be more competitive in terms of financing and pricing, dealerships are not in danger of being cut from the vehicle purchase model, at least not in the short‐term.

The internet has proven to be an invaluable tool for consumers who are either considering the purchase of a new car or actually in the process of doing so. In today's market, automotive manufacturers must have a significant market presence to compete and, in many cases, just to survive in a business environment where several of the major automotive manufacturers must find new markets overseas.

The decade of the 1990s has seen unparalleled innovation in the retailing of new and used motor vehicles. Most recently the Internet has become the facilitator of change in auto retailing. After reviewing the current state of automotive Internet services, this article develops a model whereby a new entrant could introduce a vehicle line and market that line directly to the consumer via the Internet – “the virtual dealership”. Consummation of the transaction, vehicle delivery, warranty work, after‐market parts and service, and used car trade‐ins would be handled by existing players in the automotive infrastructure. Includes a discussion of potential problems, concentrating on legal restrictions imposed by state franchise laws.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the coexistence of independent and manufacturer-owned distributors within the same distribution system. In particular, the authors seek to identify those factors that determine the use of dual distribution and the effect of dual distribution systems on different economic outcomes.

Using a case study-based approach, the authors compare different brands in different European markets of a German automobile manufacturer using 24 expert interviews in Germany, Sweden and Spain.

Our results demonstrate the importance of limited resources, investment specificity, location, divergent interests and competitive strategies for the development of dual distribution structures. The results show that the overall distribution system performance is positively related to dual distribution.

The generalizability of the findings is limited due to the use of cases for different brands of one large corporation within a specific industry and the limited number of countries that were examined. This study is also limited to the subjective evaluation of firm performance and the qualitative evidence provided by the interviewees in our sample group. Our study contributes to the ongoing debate on the use of independent and manufacturer-owned distributors among distributive vertical chains. Based on the qualitative findings, propositions for future research and managerial implications are provided.

While in previous research, the explanatory approach of make-or-buy has often been used for examining dual distribution, the authors combine insights from different theoretical streams (transaction cost theory, market-based view, resource-based view and principal-agent theory) to identify and empirically investigate the antecedents and outcomes of dual distribution. Furthermore, while prior research focused on single-country studies and franchise systems, the authors examine a multi-country sample in the automobile industry and expand the findings of the existing literature by covering different brands.

The purpose of this paper is to use managerial vision of corporate brand in relation to consumers, dealers and frontline employees to generate brand benchmarks. These benchmarks are sets of perceptions on how managers envision corporate brand to be positioned in minds of consumers, dealers and frontline employees. Additionally, this study explores managerial views concerning the importance of corporate branding in relation to an organization and its stakeholders. One of the most important strategic decisions that managers make concerns positioning of a corporate brand in the minds of key internal and external stakeholders.

Insights are drawn from the in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 senior managers from the three car manufacturers based in Australia and engaged in the corporate branding strategy.

Although managers viewed corporate brand as a “strategic tool” and “the DNA” of an organization, the findings suggest that corporate brand strategy is ultimately driven by consumers rather than multiple stakeholders. Practical (utilitarian) components of the brand value were emphasized by the managers as key brand benefits communicated to consumers and also to dealers and frontline employees. Although managers recognized the importance of being seen as a “trustworthy partner” by dealer principals and customer-facing staff, the idea of dealer networks playing a role of a “supportive mechanism” for enhancing consumer experience, was domineering.

The views expressed by the interviewees in this paper may not fully reflect the views of the whole organization regarding the corporate brand. As this study is conducted in the car manufacturing industry, its findings may not be directly applicable in other industries. As corporate branding a relatively new area, organizations do not always appreciate its scope and what such a branding strategy involves. However, organizations need to move beyond a “product branding thinking” to a strategic perspective as corporate brands build the images formed and held by key external and internal stakeholders.

Generating benchmarks for corporate brands using top management’s aspirations can assist organizations in generating focused and more nuanced understanding of how they wish corporate brand to be perceived by the key stakeholders and effectively build corporate brand.

Managerial vision of corporate brand was used as a starting point in developing reference points (i.e. benchmarks) for the desired brand identity, which may potentially be developed into relevant standards and best practices in corporate branding within an organization.

We review the Japanese distribution system, its positives and negatives, its cultural heritage, and discuss the implications for the future for it.