John’s former students Shantanu Dutta (London Business School), Mark Bergen (Minnesota) and Jan Heide (Madison) work together, often producing joint papers covering subjects such as the grey market and how and when suppliers should compete with their distributors and agents.

In the UK, Stuart Hamner-Lloyd (Gloucester)  focuses particularly  on channel relationships and has several doctoral students looking at the field.

Academics from the US and European traditions do communicate, but Per Andersson says: "You tend to belong to one tradition or the other."  Other academics say that the Americans totally ignore the qualitative European tradition. But two US academics – Narus and John – said they felt that the Europeans did produce the best and most relevant work today. 

All this begs the question,  why do this research?

To the outsider, some quantitative academic studies look like elaborate steam hammers being used to crack fairly unimportant nuts. 

George defends the approach. "We are developing what if spreadsheet models that should be able to predict actual behaviour. I think we are close to doing this today." Anderson adds: "Academics test out ideas that may sound obvious only to discover their limits. We go beyond the unrepresentative anecdotes. Academics are here to figure out why and not just what, and to prove it." 

But many feel that academics, particularly from the American tradition, are too remote.

Jim Narus (Wake Forest), who works with Jim Anderson (a colleague of Stern at Kellogg) on industrial distribution and the most effective route to market, says: "As an academic you have to be good at three things – you have to be able to build conceptual models, you have to do the research properly and you have to be able to interpret it for management practice. Very few academics are big hitters who can do all three."
He singles out the big hitters as Stern and, in the younger generation, Kumar, Erin Anderson and Per Andersson.
 
Narus feels that ivory-tower-syndrome is a particular problem in America.  "As far as I am concerned, unless what I do can inform business, then it is not worth carrying out. But that is not the approach of all channel academics. Often in North America they get their data from academic institutes and so are not forced to seek sponsors from industry. Most have never worked in industry themselves."

E.commerce and dot.com poisoned the channels area.

Nygaard agrees, adding: "US academia is surprisingly theoretical, with far fewer links to industry than in Europe."

This is reflected in whether academics are prepared to take on consultancy work from industry. John says that he and his colleagues decided long ago to put severe limits on this. Others make three times their academic salary from consultancy.

You can distinguish between academics who do a lot of mathematical modelling, such as Heide and Dutta, and those such as Anderson, Narus and Kasturi Rangan at Harvard who produce more pragmatic, empirical work. The empirical European tradition has much closer links with industry.  Per Andersson says: "I would say that most of the companies we study are heavily influenced by our work."

Will the field grow?  Narus is pessimistic about the short term. "E.commerce and dot.com poisoned the channels area. A lot of people have cut back.  I went to a big meeting last autumn at Penn State and the company managers were all saying ‘we don’t want any more channel initiatives.’” Erin Anderson argues that the sheer complexity of channels can deter academics.