Academic research has shown precisely how companies can win the trust of intermediaries.  It offers models for working out the right kind of distribution channel for your product.  It can analyse power and how it can be used.

Yet most channel managers only ever learn about academics’ work indirectly from management consultants.

Here we look at what channels academia consists of, who the academics are and how their work is generally communicated to the outside world.

This is a very small world.  George John (Minnesota) reckons that there are only 30 academics carrying out serious research worldwide.  They all know each other.  Indeed, most American academics were students of Louis W Stern or are students of his students.

There are another dozen Europeans, mainly in the Nordic region and the UK, who follow a different, more qualitative, academic tradition.

Channels for most industries have been studied in great depth in the Nordic region.

So what is marketing channels as an academic discipline?  Its roots go back to the start of the century and to rather dry economic studies, which described the volumes and margins going through channels.  John recalls: "A lot of static, very descriptive papers which focused on the maths behind butter distribution and stuff like that."

Today, it has evolved into a subject that draws its inspiration from economics, sociology, psychology, politics and even anthropology. 

The subject was revolutionised by Louis W Stern at Kellogg in the late 1960s.  Using concepts from political science and sociology, he showed how channels were dynamic power structures, fraught with conflict.  He has shown how concepts such as power, trust and influence can be broken down into measurable indicators, allowing suppliers to see what steps they should take to systematically build power.

Stern’s theories brought the subject to life for academia in the USA.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a group of academics were pioneering a more qualitative, empirical approach which looks at the wider network and says that companies are defined by the network of their relationships.  They include Hakan Haakonsson (Norwegian School of Management), David Ford (Bath), Lars-Erik Gadde (Chalmers) and Ivan Snehota (Stockholm School of Economics), who together founded the International Marketing and Purchasing Group in 1976.

The European IMP tradition remains strong today, particularly in Sweden, where Per Andersson and Lars-Gunnar Mattsson (both at the Stockholm School of Economics) and Lars-Erik Gadde (Chalmers University) have produced a lot of qualitative, long-term case studies looking at how channels change over years, even decades, within a specific industry.  Around 300 academics will attend the annual IMP forum at Lugano.