Clear and creative marketing is also essential. Kuerten says: "For Memorex, retail is like selling direct. You have to focus on the end-customer and to see the retail channel as the way to get to market, not as an end in itself."

Rob Abshire, who heads up specialist US retail consultancy Clarion Marketing and Communications, adds: "If you have no other way of differentiating your product to the retailer, then you will be forced to do so by price."

Abshire says that even so-called commodity products can be differentiated with a little care. He points to how chicken pieces in the USA gradually developed into a really wide product range: "Today you can buy skinless breasts stuffed with ham and cheese, or legs in BBQ dressing to grill outside. Who, 20 years ago, could have foreseen the way an absolutely standard, undifferentiated category would explode?

Abshire reckons every supplier can do this: "If you can position your analgesic as a product to cure migraines or back pain, rather than just another paracetemol, you can establish a totally different relationship with the consumer and with the retailer."

Companies also need to differentiate themselves. For Jo Wood, at Mediagold, this can simply mean ensuring that you deliver on your promises: "When you talk to buyers, you quickly learn that most suppliers simply don't deliver on time. For buyers this is a huge, huge headache."

"Watch for the danger signals - changes in marketshare or perhaps evidence that your competitors' price points are no longer being trashed."

Often, this is actually about sending in people who are senior enough to make things happen, says Wood: "Buyers say that sales guys often simply make frantic notes and then depart saying they will try and fix things. They donÕt hear back for weeks."

Both Wood and Kevin Chapman, sales and marketing director at Symantec UK, say that you can also use information as a differentiator. For example, you can position yourself and your company as experts on a particular product category. Wood says: "Just going into meetings with the knowledge to talk about the overall market and product trends really helps."

Information about the overall retail scene is also vital. White says: "It is easy to assume others are locked into the same buy/sell confrontation that you face. But are they? Watch for the danger signals - changes in marketshare or perhaps evidence that your competitors' price points are no longer being trashed. That kind of thing should be a wake up call."

Abshire reckons that you can also differentiate your category: "Let's take a category like curry ready meals. It will never be more than a tiny percentage of a food retailer's sales. But it could be an important way of attracting wealthy, young professionals to a store. So the retailer may take the decision to treat that category differently, as a way of differentiating his store from competitors."

He argues that, in these circumstances, the supplier can create an aura around his product range: "The retailer will be keen to take it, if he sees it as a way of defining his offering."

All of which doesn't mean that negotiating with retailers isn't tough. For Joachim Kuerten at Memorex: "Memorex is still not in some of the big retailers, who remain obsessed by price and nothing else. But that doesn't matter, because we have proved our formula works and so they will, eventually, come round."