Distribution

Marketing intermediaries help the company to promote, sell, and distribute its products to final buyers. They include resellers, physical distribution firms, marketing services agencies, and financial intermediaries. Resellers are distribution channel firms that help the company find customers or make sales to them. These include wholesalers and retailers who buy and resell merchandise. Selecting and partnering with resellers is not easy. No longer do manufacturers have many small, independent resellers from which to choose PAGE 68 The location and even exact type of stores are very important to the distribution of whole-grain pancakes. To start off, a store like Whole Foods would be great. Whole Foods is already pretty reputable and sounds like a good place to start selling. Its a store that has greatly established itself for everyone’s go-to place to start buying raw, natural, and organic products. Whole-grain pancake would suit itself perfectly there. Also, I find that the location of distributing these pancakes would be easy and flexible, since anyone nearly anywhere can eat pancakes. Physical distribution firms help the company to stock and move goods from their points of origin to their destinations. Marketing services agencies are the marketing research firms, advertising agencies, media firms, and marketing consulting firms that help the company target and promote its products to the right markets. Financial intermediaries include banks, credit companies, insurance companies, and other businesses that help finance transactions or insure against the risks associated with the buying and selling of goods PAGE 68 The whole-grain pancakes are packaged as a dry food with only dry ingredients so its not like maintaining its freshness would be an issue as opposed to something like leafy green where those foods are easily perishable. The pancakes would also conceptually be distributing the idea of a healthy lifestyle. Promoting good health starts of with promotion of eating better, it being the case of choosing whole-grain over something that has been refined. Selling the product at Whole Foods would be great but it may be also a pretty big leap to take. That’s why I am also considering selling a few boxes a maybe farmer’s markets to really hand out the idea of this organic product.