iMedia: Dialing in on Channel Conflicts

In this open-ended article, Kevin Ryan looks for best practices in paid search marketing that don't put brands at odds with their channel. Say you're a big brand name with a big brand budget, do you really want to launch a bidding war against your channel partners and affiliates? Besides, those guys were often using search engine marketing before it was on your radar. This is the eternal question of who owns the customers (answer: they were freed long ago and own themselves).

On one hand it's natural that brands make sure they can have a direct connection with prospects who are gathering detailed product information that channels are rarely good at giving. On the other hand if you want to compete with your channel partners or outright disintermediate them, you'd better be upfront about it, or they're going to make your life difficult. Don't give the channel reasons to be paranoid, as they find enough things to worry about by themselves.

I find it amusing that eBay prevents third-parties from using its brand in ads. When I was a channel account manager with Microsoft, I used to pay third parties so that they would carry my brand. I also used to be good at piggy-backing campaigns from vendors with bigger channel funds such as Compaq, but that's another story.

Now here's a thought: brands could spend co-op marketing funds with retailers and route prospects to specific landing pages. These would give the user the ability to go either to the vendor site (with a pitch about its main features, or even a prominent link to a specific subsite depending on the campaign at hand) or to participating resellers based on geography and customer group - you know, the kind of form traditionally buried deep within vendor sites.

It's difficult to think of something that's routinely done in the channel offline that couldn't also be done online. I see this as a good way to push both vendors and resellers to improve their sites and align them with business operations.