Ford goes even further, arguing that, after a flood of creativity in the 1970s, channel management per se has run out of theoretical insights.

Part of the problem is the lack of communication between academics and the outside world.  Academics tend to publish in obscure journals that are read only by their peers. And much of what they publish is too opaque, owing to its technical complexity, for the average, harassed marketing or sales manager. Narus says that recent studies show that the publications put out by management consultancies are far more likely to be read.

The problem is the lack of communication between academics and the outside world.

Yet if management consultancies form the communication route, then it is not a very efficient one.  John reckons that there are only 80 academics worldwide giving courses in channels. Only a tiny fraction of the MBAs on these courses will specialise in the field or be recruited to do channel consultancy. 

Nor have the academics produced a gutsy bestseller on the subject.  The best way to get a thorough overview of what the US academic discipline offers is to buy Marketing Channels by Anne Coughlan, Erin Anderson, Louis W Stern and Adel El-Ansary.  Clearly written and loaded with case studies, this is not a difficult read and its notes contain a fairly exhaustive list of everything published of any importance.  But it remains a good textbook, rather than a management bestseller. 

Managing Business Relationships by David Ford, Hakan Haakonsson, Lars-Erik Gadde and Ivan Snehota summarises the approach adopted by the IMP school. The IMP website at impgroup.org also contains a useful library of papers and other books.

A lack of hard data remains a huge concern for all channel academics.  You could argue that the subject has tended to develop as a soft social science, because it is so much easier to ask intermediaries or retailers about their feelings, rather than to engage in serious financial modelling.

Dutta says: "If you are in a subject such as marketing or advertising, you have access, via companies like Nielsen, to a lot of good data.  But these research companies tend not to work in channels, and so channel academics have to carry out their own primary research."

What of the future?  Academics in the USA feel they are not far from being able to predict behaviour from particular channel structures. Jonathan Hibbard at Boston University says: "Today there is more emphasis on quantifiable things, such as channel performance. People are trying to be more applied."

David Ford at Bath takes a different tack. "The idea of channels, the idea that you can set a channel strategy and exert power over partners, is really rather redundant. Today companies live, and are defined, by the network of their relationships.  That is the future."