Marketing Channels

The First question that arises to us is what is a Marketing channel? For me, its just a fancy way of saying providing goods from the producers to the end consumer. However, simple as it may be, from a marketing perspective it carries great importance.
There are different types of marketing channels such as: Agents, Wholesalers, Retailers, and Logistics.

Agents:
These are people or Firms who work for the producer and they mostly work on commission basis selling goods to wholesalers. Agents also help to market the goods for the producer as they may have access and experience of selling in a market in which your business may have not sold to before. Moreover Agents normally have very good marketing and selling techniques and they often end up giving you a good bargain, even if it means having to sell your goods at a lower price.

Wholesaler:
A wholesalers job is basically to sort and grade goods in large lots, break bulk, repack and redistribute in smaller lots to retailers.

Retailers:
These are the people which will have the most impact on your brand image, your sales, basically in my opinion they are the main medium through which you will sell and the medium which will determine your success. Examples of retailers include stores like HKB, Pot Purri, Al-Fatah, Jalal Sons, Hyperstar and even your corner shop near your house. Now, what is it that you see in these retail outlets which attract you? Advertisements, and what better place to advertise can there be when the customer is right there and can buy your good in an instant. Just reel that customer in make them interested, and that's it, good sold. Thus it is very important to have good relationships with your retailers. You can put on ads, provide special racks for your products, special offers, even have sales personnel appointed in the retail outlet to further market your product. You can even give free samples to customers to show them your product. And the best part you don't have to pay extra for all this advertising, the retailers are more than happy to have the extra adverting as it means a more flashy store and that way more customers. Just imagine what a retail outlet like Hyperstyar would look like if it didn't have any advertising. Just a plain simple boring store with stocks of goods, no flashy ads, nothing to grab your attention. You'd just buy what you want and get out, but with advertisement at retail outlets people get informed they want what the see and that way end
up buying more and so it benefits both the retailer and the producer.




Logistics:
This involves the transfer of your goods from production point or warehouse to wholesalers, retailers, etc. There are special logistics firms and at times the business has its own logistics as well. A very common method is painting the vehicle or applying vinyls to advertise, for example you may have seen vehicles with "Gourmet" vinyls and numerous others as well. DHL is a very good example and they go very far with this type of advertising as you can see for yourself looking at the image below:




Marketing channels reduce distribution costs by being experienced at what they do, they often perform their job more rapidly resulting in faster product delivery, Resellers often provide programs that enable customers to more easily purchase products by offering financial programs that ease payment requirements.
And lastly u can depend on resellers for providing information that can help improve the product. High-level intermediaries may offer their suppliers real-time access to sales data including information showing how products are selling by such characteristics as geographic location, type of customer, and product location (e.g., where located within a store, where found on a website). If high-level information is not available, marketers can often count on resellers to provide feedback as to how customers are responding to products. This feedback can occur either through surveys or interviews with reseller’s employees or by requesting the reseller allow the marketer to survey customers.