Creating Organizational Alignment Through Distribution Strategy Change – Consumer Durables

Case Study Abstract

This case pertains to a large, reputed and established multi-product organization spread across the country. The brand enjoyed high awareness as well as a considerable amount of goodwill. Indirect channel was the form of distribution that the organization chose to market their products. The channel partners who were loyal to the company and carried the entire product range consisting of a variety of office equipment, industrial products, and consumer durables were dedicated to the organization’s line of products and did not carry any competitive brands in their basket.

The challenge was to ensure that the organization capitalizes the industry’s close to a 15% growth in the consumer durables market, while keeping focus on both the rate of growth and increase its market share.

During the project while we took a systemic view, we realized that the organizational policy of channel partners handling multiple products, required them to make significant investments in acquiring stocks to keep the pipeline active. This was turning out to be a challenge for the organization to expand their partner network in a particular territory.

The key challenge here was to ensure that channel partners gave equal focus on all product lines, so that the organization was able to grow its market share, in the fast-growing consumer durable industry.

We studied the problem through a systemic lens and looked at Organizational Effectiveness factors and were able to achieve the following:

• Changes in the product pricing structure
• Active setting up of multi brand showrooms and a shift away from only company dedicated channel partners.
• Redefining of supply chain and post-sales support processes.
• Hand holding of the entire sales and service organizations throughout the journey to ensure, sales growth in the first year of around 12% propelling the organization on its path to become a market leader.