Business and Marketing

Distribution is the industry that provides the purchasing points, and a proportion of service, for products to meet consumer desires; selling is the means whereby manufacturers ensure that the products are stocked in all the appropriate outlets, or sold direct, depending on marketing requirement.

Distribution is most frequently described in terms of the grocery, toiletry, confectionery and household good trades simply because it is in these product fields that the distribution “follow-through” of marketing policy can be most clearly seen. In other products fields, the methods may differ widely though the basic principles are the same -for example industrial products may be sold more by direct selling, household durables more by selling to the retailers and less by pre-selling- but this is mainly a matter of degree.

We understand how the aim of marketing policy is to “pre-sell” as far as possible, thereby reducing the power of the retailer to influence the manner in which the product was presented to the customer. Again, the effect of the branding revolution has been to form “brand-loyalties” (or consumer franchises) for the products concerned, binding the customer to a brand so that, irrespective of the retailer`s attitude -or indeed who or where the retailer was- that loyalty would remain.

Put another way, branding and pre-selling produces a direct communication between manufactured and consumer. And the product becomes, in effect, a stage in that communication- both the aim of the communication process and a factor in it.

Indeed one can even go further and say that the product continues to make that communication even after the purchase has been made. This in one of the functions of the brand name, the pack, and the selling message on it -in order that it should continue to make the manufacturer`s communication to the family, visitors,or passersby while the product is in use, long after the sale has made.