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The paper seeks to present discussion on laddering application in the practice of marketing, considering both academic and market researches.

It provides summary points of laddering as a qualitative research technique and the importance it can have in better understanding behaviour.

The paper argues that laddering is a useful and powerful technique but still underused by scholars and practitioners. The authors consider that the main apparent barriers precluding its proper use can be related to the following aspects: time‐consuming and expensive interviews; artificial set of answers; researcher biases; and simplistic analysis of the results.

This paper contributes to a better practice of laddering since it highlights its limitations and suggests alternatives to cope with them.

Research of existing literature reveals some models (sequence of steps) for companies that want to plan distribution channels. None of these models uses strong contributions from transaction cost economics, bringing a possibility to elaborate on a “distribution channels planning model”, with these contributions and organizing the steps according to a sequence that would be useful for companies when reviewing the distribution process. This sequence was refined through in‐depth interviews with companies. Presents the final version of our model incorporating the results from the interviews.