Marketing Channel Strategy

The OmnI-ChAnnel eCOsysTem
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sales has been less dramatic. Initially, the emergence and growth of online sales 
led brick-and-mortar retailers to initiate multi-channel strategies, by adding online 
sales channels to their channel mix. More recently, some pure play online retailers, 
including Amazon and Warby Parker, have decided they might want to be pres-
ent offline too, leading them to open a few physical stores. These choices are not 
limited to retailers; upstream channel members also must decide whether to add 
online channels.
The insurance sector offers a classic example. Most insurance companies distrib-
ute their products through independent agents, so they confronted a challenging 
decision about whether to offer direct online sales. The pressure to add this online 
channel largely came from competitive forces; online only and direct distribution 
insurance companies were cutting into their markets. The traditional insurers also 
realized that consumers’ preferences were evolving when it came to ways to buy, 
learning valuable lessons from the fate of companies in other sectors that had 
been totally upended by the Internet. Yet adding an online presence created the 
risk that the insurance companies would alienate their primary channel partners, 
insurance agents. Across various sectors—insurance and otherwise—many compa-
nies sought to add online or direct channels to their traditional physical channels, 
while minimizing channel conflict, but for the most part, the integration across 
channels was minimal.
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The emergence of smart mobile devices, social networks, and in-store technol-
ogy has blurred the line between online and physical channels, though, and this 
blurring is what omni-channel strategies are all about. Consumers can search for 
information online with their smart devices while they are still in the store, giving 
rise to both 

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