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Marketing Letters
Published in: Marketing Letters 3/2018

06-06-2018

Exclusive dealing without territory exclusivity in multichannel systems: managing channel conflict and driving commitment

Authors: Alberto Sa Vinhas, Richard Gibbs

Published in: Marketing Letters | Issue 3/2018

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Abstract

The exclusive dealing literature suggests that manufacturers should protect exclusive dealers (ED) from intrabrand competition by assigning exclusive territories (ET). We consider ED systems without ET and investigate how manufacturers can enhance ED channel outcomes, such as the ED’s level of commitment to the relationship, by strategically managing its downstream communication efforts with ED and non-ED channels. We show that these cross-channel communication efforts (i.e., the quality of communication between the manufacturer and non-ED resellers in the ED reseller’s territory) are important drivers of relationship conflict and commitment for ED resellers, while playing a limited role for non-ED resellers. These results underscore the need for manufacturers to understand the perspectives and behaviors of each individual channel within a multichannel system and manage their different distribution channel types as an integrated system. We find support for our hypotheses in a sample of 672 observations corresponding to different ED and non-ED resellers selling a manufacturer’s product-line across several European countries.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
We received responses from resellers in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
 
2
The manufacturer also used transactional resellers who bought from the manufacturer on an infrequent basis. These were excluded from the sampling frame as they had only limited experience with the manufacturer.
 
3
Typically, ED resellers were established first in higher potential markets to develop the market. Non-ED resellers would be used in areas that were undercovered or to gain coverage. However, most markets were mature and the manufacturer had a long presence in these markets. Non-ED resellers were thus used in almost all of the markets.
 
4
An ex-post analysis provided further support for our approach, failing to find an effect of the communication efforts with distributors in an ED reseller’s territory on relationship outcomes for the focal ED reseller.
 
5
The European NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics) classification subdivides the economic territory of the European Union into territorial units based on criteria such as political, administrative, and institutional differences across territories. It is established by the statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat), is hierarchical and subdivides each member state into NUTS level 1 regions (e.g., SW region of France), each of which is subdivided into level 2 regions (e.g., mid-Pyrenees region in France), these in turn each being subdivided into NUTS level 3 regions (e.g., Aveyron region in France).
 
6
We estimated a 3-level HLM model with an additional (country) level but there was no between-country variance in the dependent variables. This indicates that our results hold across countries.
 
7
Due to missing data, only 386 observations were available to estimate the commitment model.
 
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Metadata
Title
Exclusive dealing without territory exclusivity in multichannel systems: managing channel conflict and driving commitment
Authors
Alberto Sa Vinhas
Richard Gibbs
Publication date
06-06-2018
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Marketing Letters / Issue 3/2018
Print ISSN: 0923-0645
Electronic ISSN: 1573-059X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-018-9462-9

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