Marketing

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT Marketing 451, Section 81 Marketing Channel Strategies Winter 2010 Professor Anne Coughlan Office: Leverone 482 Hours: by appointment Phone: (847)491-2719, fax: (847)491-2498 e-mail: a-coughlan@kellogg.northwestern.edu

NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE COURSE: This course will study the elements and management of marketing channels. For our purposes, any marketing channel is viewed as an interorganizational system involved with the task of making goods, services, and concepts available for consumption by enhancing their time, place, and possession utilities. The focus is on how institutions can effectively and efficiently transmit things of value from points of conception, extraction, and/or production to points of consumption. We will analyze marketing channels using a framework for analysis that can be used for consumer product sales, business-to-business sales, and sales of services. We will first discuss how to interpret the demands consumers have for the productive outputs of the channel. We will then show how to describe the productive activities of channel members that produce these valued service outputs. We will identify the types of gaps that can exist in channel design and how to close them. We will then discuss how to manage the channel to control channel conflict and enhance channel coordination through the constructive use of channel power. Throughout these sessions, we will use lecture/discussion, case discussion, outside speakers, and a major channel audit project to develop and use the course knowledge. We will also discuss some important channel issues, such as pricing through the channel and gray marketing, in light of the analytic framework for the course. The orientation of this course is toward the management of relationships within and among organizations that are linked together in a distribution system. The successful management of these relationships, whether through the creation of...