Download on effects of the producer-retailer

ON EFFECTS OF THE PRODUCER-RETAILER-CONSUMER
RELATIONSHIP’S KNOWLEDGE ON THE MARKETING FUTURE
Purcărea Theodor
Romanian-American University, Faculty of Management-Marketing, 1B, ExpoziĠiei Bvd., Bucharest, Email: [email protected], Telephone: 0722251373
RaĠiu Monica Paula
Romanian-American University, Faculty of Internal and International Tourism Economy, 1B,
ExpoziĠiei Bvd., Bucharest, E-mail: [email protected], Telephone: 0720891467
Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is the today’s interactive information (data) exchange between
producers, retailers and consumers that takes place on the market. It focuses on the creative process of
investigating and making connections between different ways of thinking about marketing future. We also
try to develop some thoughts in understanding this “marketing world” by analyzing the significance of
distribution channels knowledge to consumers’ benefit.
Key words: marketplace challenges; trade marketing; consumer experience; efficient consumer response,
consumer insight; critical marketing; participation marketing; revolution in marketing; new distribution
channels; selling solutions; enhance communication; strategic logistic; Romanian retail market.
An interactive information exchange takes place on the market in our days. Marketing must help confused
consumers to be more successful in facing the offerings’ proliferation and to make the right choice.
Consumer marketing targets the consumer. But who knows the consumer better? The retailers, of course,
who know what is happening at the level of the store and want to improve the category management, while
the manufacturers need theirs point of view: a feedback which represents the synergy of the partnership’s
knowledge in which are involved the producer, the distributor and the consumer.
As consumers, we all require information about this marketing knowledge and we all need to be able to
think of it having a deep understanding of the main marketing explanations that give us a framework for
making sense of the “marketing world” around us. Therefore, the need to create and deliver information
about goods/services - to the consumer - is more than obvious, and it is challenging to take part to the
creative process of investigating and making connections between different ways of thinking about
marketing future. And also to try to express some thoughts about marketing world by analyzing the
dynamic distribution channels’ to the consumers’ benefit (the increase of the use of marketing techniques;
the increase in the use of the Web by those responsible with marketing, etc.).
Trends in consumer behavior research
According to Geac there are major implications for existing distribution channels: logistic has become an
indispensable competitive weapon within most distribution environments; both customers and suppliers are
demanding more and more access to the company’s data and at any time of day or night; sales people and
managers often spend a disproportionately large amount of time on sales forecasts, reporting, tracking and
performance reviews.
Efficient distribution with adequate pre and post sale support is a part of the competitive process which
brings significant benefits to the consumer. Consumers’ feelings about the product depends on product
distribution and consumer experience during the purchasing process. Consumers’ perception about the
product affects how they mentally position the product in relation to competitive products. As distributor’s
actions can affect how consumers view the marketed products and as the marketer’s distribution system
must deliver these products to the right place, in the right amount, in the right condition (efficacious), at the
right time and for the right cost (efficiency), marketers must look for distribution assistance for their
channel arrangements.
Successful distribution (retailing) involves making sure that stores are stocked with the right products at the
right prices at the time the consumer wants them. Efficient Consumer Response is a performing strategy
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based on today’s technology tools - that causes fundamental changes in the business process – which
provides more added value to consumer. The three pillars of ECR are: providing consumer value, removing
costs that do not add value, maximizing value and minimizing inefficiency throughout the distribution
chain.
Focusing on products and brands choice rather than on channel choice is a current trend in consumer
behavior research, but nobody can now deny the obvious impact of the proliferation of channels on the
consumer behavior. Nina Michaelidou, David C. Arnott and Sally Dibb argued that channel characteristics
are determined - in comparison with multiple choice of products and by taking into account the elements
used by Hoyer and Ridgway, 1984 - by channel involvement, channel perceived risks, channel loyalty,
channel similarity and channel hedonism. It can also be included other aspects like self confidence,
information seeking, channel commitment, enduring channel involvement. They state that the increased
choice and the decision complexity is likely to impact on behavioral aspects such as brand switching.
In the case of FMCG consumers obtain the marketed products by requiring them while visiting retail
outlets, retailers selling in many different formats (physical location or virtual space) and using multiple
distribution methods. Distribution fulfils a variety of economic and social functions and has a regulatory
role to play in the confrontation with the permanent upstream and downstream diversification.
The business environment is complex and requires a high flexibility from the companies (entrepreneurs). It
is considered that flexibility is the condition to success in the complex global environment; temporal
dimension is indispensable to any approach of complexity. So, this dynamic business environment has to
be managed in such a way to produce a competitive advantage immediately.
In a world of continuous change, where the boundary between the organizations becomes even more
complex, reacting to the marketplace’s challenges means to build architecture that will flexibly integrate
corporate information. Today we are speaking about “knowledge-based strategies”, “knowledge-based
operations”, and an integrated model of battle is at the same time cerebral and cyber, takes place on land,
air, sea, and space; and it is producing predictive analysis, and creating anticipatory decision models.
As this “marketing world” is governed more by perceptions, marketers need an adequate marketing
roadmap to arrive at the best positioning on the targeted market. They have to know how customers
perceive them, having the ability of being perceived as they really are, trying to offer their customers
expertise and insights because they really need to have someone buy, so they must help their customers to
decide how to buy. To understand what customers expect marketers must be value driven, implementing
the knowledge obtained, overcoming the barriers to communications, translating each value proposition
into the customer’s language, thinking of expertise as an abundant resource and time to respond as a scarce
one, enabling the future.
The knowledge process makes up this construction in the complex business environment whose
components can be easily understood by well trained marketers; this understanding is essential and
influences the result of the knowledge process. Without knowledge through education, innovation suffers
in the context of stiff competition. Education is the most important instrument of the company for
adaptation to economic change, as an opportunity.
As the business is becoming more focused on processes, the marketing process should provide the
foundation for the organizational structure in such a way as to deliver the very basic of what customer
expects, improving customer retention, looking after what the ultimate customer wants to buy and
achieving increased profitability.
It is important to renew organizational knowledge continuously - developing a knowledge culture - and
within this framework to improve communication between internal suppliers and customers, by supporting
a cross-functional process and adopting an interactive value perspective, according to a relationship value
management, working in a way that enables the relationship marketing process to deliver on keystakeholder expectation.
We have to mention that the twenty-first century is characterized by the emphasis of business marketing on
developing relationships – and not on generating transactions – within a new focus on customer, requiring
increased levels of information about its needs. During “the Year of Differentiation”, 2007 a greater
emphasis on adding new services can be remarked.
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Focusing on what is important to customers
In the “next-generation marketing”, customer experience is going behind the lines, "audience is king" so,
let’s “learn more about the customer and how they think”. First of all a company has to see if it is possible
to integrate this customer orientation and how can be this possible. According to Don E. Shultz – as
Professor Emeritus-in-Service of Integrated Marketing Communications at the Medill School at
Northwestern University, President of the consulting firm Agora, Inc. and founding editor of the Journal of
Direct Marketing - the first thing is to stop thinking about products (ensuring the transition from product to
service) and start thinking about customers as income flows, then think about all of the ways customers
touch you, or you touch them.
When a firm is oriented towards customers it is able to see how customers respond to its efforts to meet
their needs and expectations. This customer alignment and integration presumes having good customer
data and using it efficiently. Customers always appreciate the manner in which the company and its
partners deal with dissatisfaction, inefficiency and opportunity. The “machinery” made up of the
employees’ engagement and the clients’ engagement can significantly influence the company’s
performance.
Why is this phenomenon possible? Because in reality people feel more than they think, while “models”
require and expected too much thinking from customers. Today’s marketing people - brand managers - are
more preoccupied about customer engagement rather than finding new customers, the difficulty consisting
in the fact that the recognition of the customer engagement’s need and the actual measurement of the real
engagement are two different things. And real engagement is the consequence of the
marketing/communication programme which produces and increased level of brand perception as meeting
and overwhelming customer expectations (“brand equity”), while customer expectations are generally
based on emotions.
Shultz considers that marketers’ training must be focused on what is important to customers, not to the
company because there is an increasing retailers’ focus on trying to build their own brands, their own
private labels. On the other side, the manufacturer has to start thinking about how to become a better
partner for the retailers in terms of capturing, sharing and using information and data.
Successful retailing involves making sure that stores are stocked with the right products at the right prices
at the time the consumer wants them and this aim can be achieved by implementing ECR strategy.
Implementing ECR means dramatic change in current business practices. ECR is about redesigning the
processes, altering paradigms and changing attitudes. Proper management of the ECR process is effective
in mitigating resistance and increasing co-operation. A clear communication by top management of the
benefits and rewards of ECR will make the process more effective. To implement ECR, distributors and
suppliers are making fundamental changes in the business process using today's technology tools. Their
goals are clear: provide consumers with the products and services they want; reduce inventory; eliminate
paper transactions; streamline product flow.
At the same time, from a retailer point of view, the real challenge is how to deal with Wal-Mart – that is
the 21st Economy of the World - which pioneered in replacing inventory with information and has the very
best distribution system in the world. Nobody can ignore the “Wal-Mart Symphony”…played on a global
scale “over and over 24/7/365: delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, reordering,
delivery, sorting, packing…coordinating disruptionprone supply with hard-to-predict demand…the world’s
most efficient supply chain…constantly looking for new ways to cooperate with its customers”.
Trading partners are asked to work together in order to increase value to the consumer. The intensifying
competition among trading partners often presents an apparent barrier to achieving this. However, just the
opposite is true – ECR allows companies to seek a competitive advantage by demonstrating their superior
ability in working with trading partners to add value for the consumer.
The consumer experience and consumer-created media
It’s very important to understand the consumer behavior, how customers buy products, what products are
purchased together and what is the meaning of a satisfied consumer experience – which can be defined as
the cognitions and feelings the consumer experiences during the use of a product or service; managers’
goal must be the converting of merely satisfied customers into completely satisfied customers: only the
completely satisfied customers should be considered loyal.
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That is why we need to see what kind of customer data there are inside the company and bring all of the
various types of captured and stored information together - by conducting an audit of all customer
information that is available within the organization. But as we face some practical obstacles in making the
needed changes we have to assign a budget and it ideally should be coming from the top of the
organization (the cost really has to be an organizational expense, not a departmental or group expense).
The first business command should be this kind of a holistic overview of all of the customer data and
customer information and customer institutional knowledge.
Vincent Grimaldi argues that resistance to change – which is ingrained in human nature - makes good
marketing difficult in practice. He adds that in order to maintain competitive company’s marketing must be
given a role that is both strategic and systemic, managing to live in a symbiosis with the increasingly
demanding customers and the changing environment, going beyond marketing’s support role and
penetrating most aspects of the organization. What is marketing in fact? It is worth to consider the opinions
expressed by Grimaldi that marketing is the corporate equivalent of a central nervous system; it is an art
and also a management science calling for the implementation of rigorous processes and metrics; it should
be both creative and accountable.
Grimaldi insists further that: the Baldridge criteria for performance excellence puts marketing in a leading
role, together with leadership and strategic planning; because the customer is at the very heart (the core) of
the problem, great strategies are developed around him; the corporate strategy ends up being totally
customer-driven ensuring that every step of the process is developed with a market quick feedback and…
obtaining the customers’ ”Wow”.
“Marketing is what the organization does”, says Shultz. The marketing department ought to be the one that
is aligning the organization, taking into account that there are lots of tools, tactics, techniques that can be
outsourced - including strategy - rather than having those done by employees.
Within this framework Shultz’s company has proposed a “media consumption model”, because every
developed approach is based on distributing messages through the media and what is measured is
distribution: every consumer today is creating his or her own internal information network, having an
internal model for how he evaluates information sources and how he solves his problems (internal
networks created for themselves). Consumers have created the ability to not only give advice, but also to
get advice from multiple sources and, that is why marketers need to look at how customers and consumers
and users communicate with each other, by going back to the consumer-created media. In the same time,
Jonah Bloom shows that “we now live in a culture of instantly disseminated opinion”, everything in the
public domain being instantly spread and dissected and in such a world marketers have to accept that they
won't please all the people all the time: consumers are in control and messages are reinterpreted and
criticized.
Achieving a broader perspective on marketing
There is a continuous debate within the academic marketing community about the so-called “critical
marketing” and providing critical understanding: of the organization and impact of marketing operations;
of the factors that are shaping marketing activities; of marketing professions and morality on the
marketplace; of the mechanisms used by marketers for creating and supporting customer values; of
consumer culture and the impact of brands; of the development and implementation of marketing strategies
and programs; of the impacts of the marketing concepts’ and techniques’ application in a competitive
environment; of marketing’s interpretation within the framework of the relationship marketing; of
redefining markets and marketing.
Marketers or not, we are all consumers and cannot escape the market, but we are not passive recipients of
what marketers do, that is why – sustains Michael Saren, Professor of Marketing at Leicester University
School of Management, UK – marketers must look at the marketing phenomenon as consumers experience
it, as active participants in it, by achieving a broader perspective on marketing. And, the key to achieving
such a new perspective is building of customer relationships, by understanding that customer relationships
are the most important company’s asset needing to be managed.
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This “interaction approach” (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing-IMP), whose essential aim is to create
value for both parties, is based on the idea that this process of interactivity takes place between active
buyers and sellers that are individually significant to each other.
According to Saren, the “critical marketing” extends its domain and gives a specific example to
demonstrate the necessity that the academic discipline of marketing must encompass the wide range of
activities and effects that it manifests in practice today. The recent stream of research asserting that the
human body itself is the site of all consumption, people’s identities and self-esteem are closely associated
with their bodies. He also adds the problematic issue of relevance in marketing, considering the fact that in
management and marketing relevance itself has often been defined in a restricted manner to imply
usefulness as measured by a sub-group of either practitioners or self-selected intermediaries.
The future marketing department: more customer insight
Three years ago, being in Bucharest, Philip Kotler attracted our attention to the imperative of “the
development of better abilities in innovation, differentiation, branding and service, in a word marketing”,
recommending the development of a stronger marketing: holistic, strategic, technological, financially
oriented. The “father of marketing” emphasizes, among other things, the need to resort to a lateral
marketing, conceiving new product and service ideas. In Kotler’s opinion marketing is the art of brand
building.
He also showed that one of the shortest definitions of marketing is the profitable fulfillment of needs. The
commercial space is no longer what it was, more and more marketing people acknowledge the need to have
a more complete, cohesive approach which goes beyond traditional applications of the marketing concept.
An approach that attempts to acknowledge and reconcile the sphere and complexity of marketing activities
is represented by holistic marketing (development, design and implementation of programs, processes and
marketing activities which acknowledge content and interdependencies) whose components are: relational
marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing and marketing of social responsibilities.
Marketing management is - according to the same authorized opinion - the art and science of choosing
target markets and winning, preserving and increasing the client base by creating, delivering and
communicating a superior value to the client. This - the client - has, in many cases, undefined preferences,
which are ambiguous or even conflicting.
The famous Al Ries wrote - in the spring of 2006 – that marketing study starts with psychology study: if
psychology is the systematic study of human behaviour, than marketing is the systematic study of human
behaviour on the market. In order to discover how the company can better satisfy customers’ needs,
marketing people have to work together with the company’s clients, offering assistance and trying to
understand their preferences. That is why Kotler considers “participation marketing” as a more appropriate
concept, compared to “permission marketing”.
On the other hand, Kotler’s mentor - Peter Drucker - says that the purpose of marketing is to know and
understand the customer so well that the product or service is perfectly suited to him and sells itself. But
customers respond differently to the company’s image and the company’s brand; the identity - the way in
which a company identifies itself, self-positions itself or positions its products - and the image - the way in
which the public perceives the company or its products/services – require a distinction.
The key to branding - emphasized Kotler and Keller - is the customers’ perception of the differences
between the brands belonging to a category of products. A branding strategy identifies which elements of a
brand (name, term, sign, symbol, design, a combination of the previous) the company chooses to apply to
the different products it sells. In order to serve multiple market segments often multiple brands are required
(the basic principle in designing a brand portfolio is the maximization of market coverage, so that no
potential customer is ignored).
But how do we get customer insight? The future’s marketing organization is going to have employees
who can deal with both push and pull forms of marketing, by recognizing that today’s real challenge is
to be very responsive, and to give feedback (the responses generated by the marketing come back to
customer service, sales, technical support), so that the marketing people have relevance and view of what
the responses are. Brand experiences today - according to the same Don E. Shultz - are the responsibility of
part-time marketers - employees, retailers, customer service people who are not trained as marketing
people but they are doing most of the marketing for the organization being on the ground responding to
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people – and not of marketers. That is why one of the challenges is to get budget starting by thinking about
customers as flows of income, aggregating those customers up and, building a financial calculation so that
it is an investment and a return (beyond the actual marketing department as a cost center that can’t
measure, financially, the returns the marketing organization is generating).
The main distribution chains in Romania
It is well known that marketing’s study object is a result of the economists’ research (from the end of the
XIXth century) referring to the nature of distribution process. An article published in Fortune magazine
(April, 1962), where Peter Druker considered that distribution represents “the African continent of
economy”, led to a significant development of marketing theory referring to the conceptualization of
physical distribution (marketing logistic).
Eleven years ago, in a study about goods distribution, there were identified two main factors which create
the motivation which is necessary to the distribution progress: technological innovation and stiff
competition.
Philip Kotler mentioned - in a book published three years ago - that marketing people use three types of
marketing channels: communication channels, distribution channels and service channels. Distribution
channels - that are used for displaying, selling or delivery of product or service to the consumer or user include distributors, engross sellers, retailers, agents. In a market approach, competitors are represented by
those companies which satisfy the same requirement to the consumer. The competitive advantage is
referring to a company’s ability to perform better than its competitors in one way or another. Long term
competitive advantage is a profitable target for companies. Distribution efficiency requires finding out
inventory, location and transportation savings.
Kotler and Keller underline the need to build a creative marketing organization, the capacity for strategic
innovation and imagination coming from the assembly of instruments, processes, abilities and measures
which will allow the company to generate more and better ideas than their competition. And this requires
also assuming social responsibility because the business success and the client’s continuous satisfaction are
closely related to the implementation of high leadership standards of a business and marketing.
But according to Nirmalya Kumar, “management has forgotten, or never realized, the ability of the
marketing function to help drive organizational change”. CEOs have lost faith in marketing primarily for
two reasons: shareholders and analysts are pressuring corporations and their CEOs to deliver against shortterm profit and revenue objectives; marketers are too often seen as specialists and tacticians talking about
the marketing-mix rather than strategists who help CEOs lead organization-wide initiatives that have
strategic, cross-functional, and bottom-line impact. To improve value the company’s value, marketers must
engage CEOs and the top leadership in meeting the two marketplace challenges that all companies face:
enhancing customer loyalty and reducing downward pressure on prices. To meet this, companies are
looking for growth-related initiatives like expanding to new and growing channels of distribution, selling
solutions instead of products, and pursuing radical rather than incremental innovation. The challenge
consists in finding which aspects of marketing are really scale-sensitive versus those elements where local
adaptation truly increases value for customers. The methods used - to reduce the tension between designing
programs and products that are global versus local - are: increasing understanding through market research
that allows the examination of this issue in a more "objective" manner; moving managers across countries
to enhance communication.
This preoccupation towards distribution efficientization is also demonstrated by the role played by the
unique European market that is referring to: the creation of new market opportunities in Europe; costs
savings and increase of productivity as a result of distribution methods’ eficientization – required by the
sustaining of business strategies. Efficient distribution facilitates innovation in the distribution process,
new technology implementation, and also low price products’ at high quality and high service for the
client.
Romania is an important market for the large international distribution networks, a fact proven by the
investments that continue to increase constantly, due to the following factors:
•
Romania is a continually developing (increasing) market, with a significant economic growth
rate, both effective and forecasted, above other European economies, the consumption market
being far from saturated;
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•
the size of the Romanian market is significant (second place in terms of size in Central and
Eastern Europe, after Poland);
•
the average income per capita registers growth;
• on the first of January 2007 Romania has become member of the European Union.
In the past years Romania has recovered some of the gap registered from the point of view of the
development of the retail market - even if there was another significant intermediary network of small
shops and kiosks. Important structural changes have taken place through the development of national
logistic distribution structures. The new formats – cash & carry (replacing wholesalers), supermarket (still
representing one of the main types of modern retail outlet), hypermarket (offering maximum product range
and good discounting performance) and discount have remodeled the image of domestic trade. A
substantial change in the population’s consumption attitude can be mentioned, behaviour which in fact is
the promoter of the development of retail networks.
At present numerous international distribution networks are active on the Romanian market: Metro,
Carrefour, Intermarche (Interex), Rewe Zentral AG (Selgros, Billa, XXL Mega Discount), Louis Delhaize
(Cora, Mega Image, Profi), BricoStore (each having a network of stores developed according to the target
market and the specifics of the group), Auchan, Ikea, …waiting for and Tesco. Their entry on the
Romanian market was determined by the development potential and opportunities offered. The entry of
new players on the Romanian retail market and the development intentions of those already existing cause
the growth of competition at a market level and consumer is the one who gains important advantages.
No. of stores
No
Name
Group
Store Type
Total
Bucharest
Entry onto the
Romanian
Market
1
Carrefour
Hyparlo Group
Hypermarket
10
5
2001
2
"
Louis Delhaize
Hypermarket
3
2
2003
3
Real
Metro Group
Hypermarket
13
1
2006
4
Auchan
Auchan Group
Hypermarket
3
1
2006
5
Pic
Grupul Pic
Hypermarket
4
0
2004
6
Metro
Cash&Carry
Metro Group
Cash&Carry
23
4
1996
7
Selgros
Cash&Carry
Rewe
AG
Cash&Carry
17
3
2000
8
BricoStore
BricoStore
Do It Yourself
9
4
2002
9
Praktiker
Metro Group
Do It Yourself
14
2
2002
10
Spar
Hypermarket
Spar
Hypermarket
1
0
2006
11
Spar
Supermarket
Spar
Supermarket
13
0
2006
12
Billa
Rewe
AG
Supermarket
25
3
1999
13
Mega Image
Louis Delhaize
Supermarket
18
15
1994
14
Gima (G’Market)
Gima
Supermarket
5
3
1999
15
Interex
Intermarche
Supermarket
9
0
2001
16
Profi
Louis Delhaize
Supermarket
44
0
1995
Zentral
Zentral
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(discount)
17
Plus
Tengelmann
Supermarket
(discount)
50
3
2005
18
Kaufland
Lidl & Schwarz
Hypermarket
31
2
2005
19
Penny Market
Rewe
AG
Zentral
Supermarket
(discount)
40
1
2001
20
Penny
XXL
Rewe
AG
Zentral
Supermarket
(discount)
5
1
2001
21
Artima
(Carrefour)
Carrefour
Supermarket
21
0
2001
22
Altex
Grup Altex
Specialized
store
125
11
1992
23
Domo
Domo
Specialized
store
110
11
1994
24
Flanco
International
Flanco
International
Specialized
store
110
11
1992
25
Cosmo
Cosmo
Specialized
store
78
9
1998
Market
The Main distribution chains in Romania
(Source: Romanian-American University, TOEMM, February 2008)
The first international retail company that entered Romania was Metro, in 1996. Subsequently stores such
as Billa, Gima, Profi, Mega Image, XXL Mega Discount, Selgros, Carrefour, Bricostore, Praktiker,
Intermarche, Cora, Univers’All (this last mentioned case should become an „interdisciplinary” case study;
we also remark the „birth” of Carrefour in the previous central location of Univers’All Bucuresti) opened.
Alongside these mall-type commercial centers were opened, local specialized stores networks were also
opened.
We can consider the evolution of the retail market in Romania to be significant, in tune with the evolution
of consumption behaviour which is referring to:
•
target clients, buyers with medium and high income, targeting time and energy savings and
the satisfaction of various needs;
•
the increase of the number of products sold (FMCG);
•
the increase of the presence of private brands (products marketed under their own private
label);
• the increase of promotional efforts.
The big companies on the retail market are continuing their aggressive expansion nationally. The
supermarket chains are looking to cover well defined areas from a client potential point of view. The
strategy of these companies that invest in Romania takes into consideration the trends of the Romanian
market. An important element is therefore represented by the changes in consumer behaviour, which is
modeled by outside stimuli and which, in the conditions of an ever stiffer competition, will become more
and more demanding regarding services, price and placement.
The competition on the retail market is stiffer and stiffer. The following period will impose major changes
on the retail market. Traditional trade will reduce its share with the development of modern forms of trade.
The importance of the niches left open on the market will increase, one of these being represented by
neighbourhood trade and specialized small stores. It is surely that in the near future significant changes will
take place on the retail market. Time will demonstrate if the traditional commerce will keep the tempo with
modern commerce development, generated by: the increase of marketing competition for gaining free
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market niches and new ones’ identification; more frequently usage of participation marketing; authorities’
attempts to achieve indispensable commercial balance between city centre and periferical areas (by net
evaluation of commercial implants’ contribution to the social-economic development).
Distributors have a multidimensional vocation and duty in the field of information. The value of
information is universally acknowledged and the importance of certain issues such as information
management and IT resources management has increased accordingly. Information technology is what
today connects the business strategy and quick organizational reaction time. Strategic management and the
demands of artificial intelligence, information systems management, integrated electronic businesses and
marketing in the IT sector, all of these require a careful evaluation of the technology trends in technology,
economy and abilities, as well as the periodic auditing of information systems.
The globalization process accelerates the distributors’ will to rationalize and improve administration. The
priorities in terms of investment will be: client performance; running activities from an operational point of
view and an economic point of view. A generalization of technology is noted and the realization of the
strategic importance of a better knowledge of the client base. We see today a multiplication of the methods
of consumption, a modernization of logistic structures, an evolution of conceptions and store formats.
Consumers want more and more choices, more and better services, more information, increasingly better
price/quality rations, less and less expanded time and energy, higher and higher trust in the distributors and
the products offered.
Conclusions
We are all consumers and we require to be informed about the marketing knowledge and eager to
participate in this debate about knowledge to the consumers’ benefit by creating internal information
networks about distribution channels that are constantly changing. Consumer’s feelings about the product
depends on product distribution and consumer experience with the purchasing process.
FMCG distribution on the Romanian market has proven to be the field with the most rapidly impact on our
EU integration. There is an obvious result of marketing activities which substantially increase the power of
the brand in the eyes of the Romanian consumer (not being passive recipients of what marketers do within
this symbiosis).
The existence of a clients’ identity alternation between two extremes – traditional client and cyber client –
that impose a more proactive marketing style, is becoming visible. More creative market conducted
approaches are necessary, taking into consideration the advantages of traditional marketing, combined with
new techniques and proposals of superior value in relation with the evolution of market structure, channels
and clients’ expectations.
As a final conclusion, we must take into consideration Ph. Kotler’s recommendations. In hypercompetitive
economies marketing should constantly create new ideas and build brands more through performance and
less through promotion; also, the clients have to be served differently, but appropriately, building
performing information and communication systems and analyzing profitability by segment, by client and
by distribution channel. This evolution and confrontation with the new opportunities and challenges require
new abilities and competences.
References:
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