Skip to main content

37. Supply Chain

Whereas marketing channels connect the marketer to the target buyers, the supply chain describes a longer channel stretching from raw materials to components to final products that are carried to final buyers. 

For example, the supply chain for women’s purses starts with hides, tanning operations, cutting operations, manufacturing, and the marketing channels that bring products to customers. This supply chain represents a value delivery system. 

The supply chain is a channel stretching from raw materials to components to finished products carried to final buyers. The supply chain for coffee may start with Ethiopian farmers who plant, tend, and pick the coffee beans and sell their harvest. 

If sold through a Fair Trade cooperative, the coffee is washed, dried, and packaged for shipment by an Alternative Trading Organization (ATO) that pays a minimum of $1.26 a pound. The ATO transports the coffee to the developed world where it can sell it directly or via retail channels.

Each company in the chain captures only a certain percentage of the total value generated by the supply chain’s value delivery system. When a company acquires competitors or expands upstream or downstream, its aim is to capture a higher percentage of supply chain value.

Problems with a supply chain can be damaging or even fatal for a business. When Johnson & Johnson ran into manufacturing problems with its consumer products unit (which makes Tylenol and other products), it hired away from Bayer AG a top executive known for her skill at fixing consumer and supply chain problems

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

19. What is a Market?

 Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (such as the housing market or the grain market). Five basic markets and their connecting flows are shown in below. Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services, and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers. Consumers sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services. The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer, and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services.     Each nation’s economy, and the global economy, consists of interacting sets of markets linked through exchange processes. Marketers view sellers as the industry and...

33. Product

Companies address customer needs by putting forth a value proposition, a set of benefits that satisfy those needs. The intangible value proposition is made physical by an offering, which can be a combination of products, services, information, and experiences. Product is anything capable of satisfying human wants. A product is anything we can offer to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a need or want. Thus, a product may be a physical good like a cereal, tennis racquet, or automobile; or a service such as an airline, bank, or insurance company.  A product could also be a retail outlet like a department store, specialty store, or supermarket; a person such as a political figure, social media celebrity, entertainer, or professional athlete; an organization like a nonprofit, trade organization, or arts group; or a place including a city, state, or country; or even an idea like a political or social cause. We can define five levels of meaning fo...

08. Products and Services marketing together

 The service-dominant logic suggests that the separation between products and services is not a clear one. The ‘servicisation’ of products refers to the relative importance of the service dimension in a given product offering. Thinking in marketing has moved from a strategy that conceives of either a product or a service to one which sees both product and service dimensions in any market offering.  Many products have a service component and many services have product components. Take for example a physical product such as a car. We purchase a car, which provides the service of getting from one place to another. But the car comes with its own need for services such as insurance, finance, repairs and even a petrol station.  The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has built a service into its cars that alerts the driver if they are falling asleep.      What a great service! Another example is a mobile phone provider such as Nokia. The company provides a product (m...