Definitions and scope. Marketing scholars define a marketing
channel as a set of interdependent organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption
(Palmatier et al. 2014). For marketing professionals,
marketing channels typically include three main parties: manufacturers,
intermediaries (i.e., agents, wholesalers, retailers),
and end-users (individual consumers or business customers).
As such, marketing channels span various activities from the
point of product or service production to its final consumption
Supply chain researchers assign a narrower
role for marketing channels – that of boundary spanners
to external users or customers in the outbound (downstream)
portion of the supply chain (Hult, Closs, and Frayer 2014)Thus,
whereas marketing scholars research marketing channels issues
from either the upstream or downstream perspective of the overall
supply chain, supply chain researchers tend to consider only
the downstream issues involving the customers
Marketing research in channels. Our review indicates that
out of the four supply chain domains, channels research is
the most influential within the marketing literature, with about
five times more citations than the second most cited domain
(purchasing). To facilitate the literature review, we provide
detailed summaries of highly citedmarketing channels articlesin
Table 1