Nirmalya Kurmar is an arresting figure. Tall, slim and elegant in a tailored Nehru suit, he sports a small, green cloth shamrock in celebration of St Patrick's Day. "My Irish students gave it to me," he says, seemingly unimpressed by Irish traditions.

Kumar is nothing if not international. Born and educated in India, he spent a dozen years in US academia before coming to Europe. Currently he is on sabbatical from IMD and working at the London Business School. Traveling to over 20 countries in an average year, he is just back from Tunisia, where he has been advising the decorative paints division of Akzo-Nobel on worldwide distribution and marketing strategies vis-a-vis global retailers.

"So what do you want to talk about?" he says, dropping half a dozen papers on the table in front of me. After a lifetime of teasing truths out of businessmen, academics are somewhat disconcerting. Press a button and they deliver their thoughts. When they go into lecture mode, it is a little like sitting with a human jukebox.

I flick through the articles. They range from how to build new channels to how to live with big retail. Kumar has also done a lot of work on trust and conflict in channels, based on a study of several hundred rather pugnacious motor dealers. Together with his mentor professor Louis Stern, he has produced seminal work on trust in routes to market. The publications of his work in The Financial Times, The Harvard Business Review and Journal of Marketing Research reflect his status.

Perhaps we could explore the ideas in his forthcoming book, I suggest. Entitled Marketing - a CEO's perspective, this looks at why marketing should be important to chief executives.

The first shock is that Kumar doesn't think that it is.

He says 'Marketing has got sidelined. Chief executives are under time pressure. They delegate anything which doesn't call for their personal attention. Marketing has declined in importance because it is seen as tactical - simply a question of the four Ps - price, product, place and promotion. As a result, in the average company, the face time that the chief marketing officer gets with the CEO is relatively small, compared to the CFO or COO."

"Today the top six retailers in the world account for 25% of the sales of Procter & Gamble. In a decade they will be half of P&G sales."

But companies face several important transformational marketing challenges which, he argues, chief executives can't duck. "These are initiatives which anyone in marketing inside companies should be raising and leading, if they want to increase their profile," he points out.

To be worthy of the CEO's attention, transformational marketing initiatives must have three attributes. "They have to be cross-functional - so they canÕt just be delegated to a particular individual or department, they have to be strategic and they have to impact the bottom line."

Three of Kumar's high profile marketing transformations are related to routes to market. "Firstly, CEOs of branded products are beginning to understand that retailing has changed dramatically and that their companies need to re-engineer to meet this new reality," he says.

'Secondly, companies need to migrate from the channels of today to the channels of tomorrow, especially by mobilizing the Internet. A failure to move rapidly can have devastating impacts - look at how Dell has gained at the expense of Compaq."

The third area revolves around how product driven companies can transform themselves into solution providers. This, says Kumar, is not an easy step. "Yes, companies like IBM, Baxter Healthcare and WW Grainger have made this leap, but there is a whole raft of steps you need to take in order to make this move successfully."

Kumar reckons that many CEOs haven't yet appreciated what the growing power of large retailers means for their companies. "Put simply, you have to be the first or second brands in any given product category, otherwise you will end up competing with everyone else to manufacture the retailers own in-house brand. Unless you have a distinct value proposition, you can only differentiate on price." Brand deletion, SKU rationalization, and global customer teams, dedicated to individual retailers, are all part of this transformation.

Doesn't Kumar think the idea that retail is becoming global has been rather overdone? Look at how Walmart has stumbled in Germany. And many large retailers who have gone international are still buying locally. Maybe, says Kumar, but the trend is clear. "Today the top six retailers in the world account for 25% of the sales of Procter & Gamble. In a decade they will be half of P&G sales. The organizational implications of this change are truly mind boggling."

Yes, I argue, but that is food. What about other categories? Name one, says Kumar, with a dangerous glint in his eye. "Urrr...Well what about clothing - fashion - that is still much more fragmented." Kumar counts off the names on his fingers "Armani, Gap, Zara, H&M, Banana Republic... they are all global. And that is true of almost every major product category. Look at B&Q in DIY, Royal Vopak in chemical distribution, Expedia in travel."

"A good CEO has to force his company kicking and screaming into the new channels."

Kumar says this growing power means companies will have to reorganise around the needs of their largest customers. "Today, companies are still organised around countries and products, but what happens when the customer business development manager for Walmart accounts for greater sales than the country manager for France?"

It sounds persuasive. But, I point out, in most industries companies have tried centralising and failed. For instance, in the IT industry Compaq and Apple have both tried to move to Pan-European organisations and then moved back. "Yes," he says, "Companies do oscillate. But they never go right back to the old model. Power is gradually being concentrated. This has to be the case if a company is to remain the number one brand with the powerful retailers.'

Secondly, he sees a need for CEOs to ensure that their companies switch to the new channels on time. "History suggests that manufacturers tend to cling to the traditional distribution channels for too long. They pay too much attention to their existing partners complaints. Look at how long it took Goodyear in the USA to expand its distribution channels from traditional independent dealers to mass merchandisers, such as Walmart and Sears."

For Kumar, a good CEO has to force his company kicking and screaming into the new channels.

"Markets always changes faster than marketing. So you have to constantly change your channels." He reckons that CEOs should accept, and even welcome, channel conflict as the price of change. "If you don't have channel conflict, it generally means that you have gaps in your coverage of the market."

He argues that suppliers should also learn to differentiate between channel conflict, where several channels are all targeting the same consumer, and channel competition, where several channels are reaching different consumer segments.

For Kumar, the ultimate way to deal with serious channel conflict is to publish a transparent menu of prices for all intermediaries. "That way you can turn round your existing partners and say 'you too can have the same price as big retail - if you are prepared to collect from our warehouse, buy 1 million units, etc.'"

When Kumar talks of new channels, he is primarily thinking of retail and the web. So where does the net fit into all this? "You can sell over the web where the value of the goods is high relative to the shipping cost and where touch, feel and see is not important."

So how do big retailers feel about suppliers selling their products direct over the web? Kumar says most of them couldn't care less anymore. "They aren't worried about manufacturers going to the web. They know that most who try to do this will ultimately learn that they lack the assortment and the skills for retailing to end-users."

Kumar sees the move to big retail as completely revolutionising how suppliers sell. The new mantra is not stuff the channel, but the Black and Decker battle cry: "Sell one, ship one, build one."

Again, Kumar reckons that most suppliers in retail and in business-to-business have not yet understood the real implications of all this. "Push marketing is dead. We are going to live in a world where end-user sales drives the entire process. Walmart in the USA was fundamental in changing to this the process. It is no longer interested in taking products on a special offer from suppliers."

Many academics expect own brand to fade and see the growing strength of brands like Coca Cola as the future. Kumar disagrees. Particularly in Europe he sees own brand as very powerful. Many US-based academics and brand marketers see retailersÕ private labels as some sort of cheap imitation of manufacturer branded products but this is not true anymore. "Look at Sainsbury and their three differentiated brands - Be Good To Yourself, Taste the Difference, and Blue Parrot Café for kids. They are adding value to their brands and competing head on with manufacturer brands."

And he paints a grim picture of the future of wholesale distribution. "Retailers want to buy direct so distributors will see their natural customer base of smaller players slowly shrinking."

An alternative route for suppliers is to transform themselves into solution providers. In every field Kumar sees a strong role for companies which are prepared to build a bespoke offering for customers.

"Push marketing is dead. We are going to live in a world where end-user sales drives the entire process."

But he feels that most CEOs don't understand now difficult it is to move from being a product supplier to being a solution provider. "You have to become product agnostic - you can't successfully use the solution provider label as a camouflage for cross selling your own products. You have to be willing to work with far fewer customers. And you have to be expert at picking those who are really prepared to pay for tailored solutions.

You have to modularise your products, services, and systems to deliver custom solutions at reasonable costs. And you have to employ people with a totally new skill set. As IBM learnt, instead of services supporting products, products have to support services in a solutions company.'

Perhaps it is time for chief executives to start taking routes-to-market seriously afer all.

Marketing: A CEO Perspective will be published next year. Nirmalya Kumar can be reached at kumar@imd.ch