Specialist shops in retail won’t go under – manufacturers‘ concerns about branding and marketing rescues traditional distribution channels

(Thank you, Claudio, for pointing out this trend in the first place!)

Internet has radically changed the world – including marketing and sales of products and even services. With cheap transportation, tariff reductions and saver payment systems world-wide on the one hand and large savings in shop rents, product display, promotions and expensive employees for product advice on the other hand, internet dealers have been gaining an increasing market share in retail. Not only cost-sensitive buyers but more and more the general customer base wants to profit of quick and stressless shopping and fast and save delivery right to their house.

However, such internet shopping has always needed and exploited retail shops with product display, professional advice and support. Buyers started to inspect the products in stores, just to get home and order them cheaper over the internet. As retail shops could neither prove such exploiting behaviour nor call on any legal measures against it, they were bound to carry the costs themselves – with layoffs in particular. There seemed to be no end to this trend until to the point where price competition on the internet got so fierce and the high fix costs of retail shops so unbearable that the whole retail market collapsed and there would be no more traditional shops at all. Solutions like product display and sales by manufacturers themselves (see Apple stores) struggle in maintain the corporate image or lack knowledge about local markets, while ideas of exhibition halls with entrance fees would scare off or be bypassed by the customers.

To my own surprise, I have come to learn about a solution by the manufacturers themselves: More and more of them (see Philips for example) have started to provide exclusively specialist stores with specific high-end product lines. Others (like HP Compaq) distribute different product lines over internet and retail. As manufacturers could not possibly be (directly) concerned about the fate of independent retail shops, the reason for this strategy must lie in bad experiences with their corporate image and profits: Probably, lack of advice and support by internet resellers did not cast as much shadow on the resellers themselves as on the manufacturers’ brands. Further, the fierce competition among internet resellers will probably have effect on the production development in the long term: Assuming that in the near future, internet resellers try to out-compete their rivals by requesting only cheap models (with lower margin) from manufacturers, they cannot bear the costs of their high-cost and -profitable series anymore. Thus, price rivalry on retail markets will gain such a strong momentum that it effects production of the manufacturers themselves.

These two reasons appear to be the reason for this striking development in consumer markets: Manufacturers limit the distribution of their product lines and cancel market forces – in favour of their own and retailers’ profits.

Of course, such separations of distribution channels will heavily affect market overview, consumer information, buying behavior and satisfaction: No longer can customers compare prices as well as product specifications in retail or internet stores, but need to access manufacturers’ websites to gain full overview. This goes hand in hand with recent changes in retail shops where manufacturers send their own employees to. Those employees will only promote, inform about and support customers of their brand.

As a result, radical changes in competition and market forces will result: Internet resellers will be parked on a new discount market while retail shops won’t compete among each other as much as manufacturers inside the shops themselves.

A discrete approach to the systematization and interpretation of action incentives and its conception

It is said that people think differently – but it is also supposed that they all think in logical patterns, i.e. cascades of causal relations. The concept of logic is understood to be universal or at least, reconstructable in terms of intersubjectivity. (In this understanding, science is just another belief or concept, by the way.) Thus, despite different ways of thinking, they all can be understood by anyone.
I reckoned that the vast variety of arguments that explain and justify incentives for their decisions for actions can be categorized in three different types. The categorization is rought but allows to differentiate in three striking characteristics by showing inn the same time that despite these differences, the underlying argumentative pattern is yet the same.
The three different types are emotional-unconsciously rational, rational-egoistic and reasonable/ ideological arguments. The names are completely arbitrary, probably not sufficient and face a normative bias, too. Therefore, the concept of this differentiation shall not be considered by these names only.
The emotional-unconsciously rational kind of argument is both the most frequent

The second type of rational-egoistic arguments differs in exactly these two aspects. On the one hand, the creation of logically consistent causal arguments evolves in a conscious and deliberate way. On the other hand, the motivation for its creation is self-interested, thus conclusions of such reasoning are set against one’s own person under the consideration whether the outcome bears advantages or disadvantages.
As the motivation and incentive behind rational argumentation are personal merits, it can only change through supportive or affirmative input while contradicting or even disproving arguments will be either shut out or lead to the abandonment of the whole causal cascade. Thus, rational arguments have to be always and clearly consistent with self-interest and henceforth will be promoted among people with similar interests only. Towards other attitudes, rational arguments get replaced by reasonable ones. It has to be stressed out such reasonable arguments are not means by ends but mere instruments of replacement.
This leads us to the third type of reasonable arguments which is different from rational-egoistic arguments in their intersubjective reasoning. Causal cascades get built on motives and incentives that can be assumed or suggested among many, preferably all people, and their outcome redounds to a majority’s, preferably everybody’s advantage. Thus, such argumentation does not exclude personal interests but promotes them only if aligned with others. This way of reasoning is not only self-supportive but seeks commong agreement: In contrast to rational argumentation reasonable one does not reason at the expense of other interests but tries to consider all of them. Therefore, reasonable arguments are open to and can change through both affirming and disapproving input. Reasonable argumentation can not only be comprehended by different interest groups but also related to.
This aspect makes reasonable arguments highly sustainable and fit to public political discussions. [work in progress]