Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Managing Omnichannel Retailing

Based on a target market analysis, retailers must decide which channels to employ to reach their customers. Increasingly, the answer is multiple channels. Staples sells through its traditional retail brick-and-mortar channel, its own website (staples.com), virtual malls, and thousands of links on affiliated sites.

This increased reliance on multiple channels means that channels should be designed to work together effectively. Although some experts predicted otherwise, catalogs have actually grown in an internet world as more firms have revamped them to serve as branding devices and to complement online activity. Victoria’s Secret’s integrated multichannel approach of retail stores, catalog, and internet has played ...