Placing Products in the Right Place (Recon Thursday/Place)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing.  Today is Recon Thursday and we’re going to look inside your company at Place, one of the 7Ps, also known as distribution.

What channels are you currently leveraging to make your product available to customers and potential customers?  You may be in a direct sales or retail environment; perhaps you’re selling your products online or using distributors or catalogs.  Your business may be centered on trade shows and the Bt2B environment.  There are many outlets to sell your product.  The question of course is where are the right places to be?

Seriously evaluate all the ways your customers can buy your product.  Are you everywhere you should be?  Are some channels working well and others aren’t?  Do you need to make changes?  Should you find new channels?  That is what you have to ask yourself.  Also, monitor results by distribution method on an ongoing basis to ensure customers are finding your product where they want it to be and you are achieving the results you expect.  If a particular channel is working for you, then keep pushing product through it.  If another channel has poor results, consider shutting it down.

Also research what your competition is doing.  You may be able to identify an interesting practice that you can emulate.  Search from a broader perspective as well, there may be another company doing something creative with respect to how they are pushing their products through a channel and you can do the same thing.

Lastly, you can always ask your customers which distribution methods best meet their needs.  Again, the goal is to be where they want to find your product, not necessarily in the channel that you prefer.

That concludes Recon Thursday.  Be sure to stop by tomorrow for Digital Friday.  To discuss an online or face-to-face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.