Marketing Archives

Customer Segments / Growth Strategies / Lighting / Lighting2 / Marketing / Sales Channel / Supplier / Products

Planning for 2009

David Gordon Posted On September 30, 2008

The beginning of the meeting season coincides with the beginning of the planning season. Many manufacturers are well into the process with some distributors just starting. Looking into your crystal ball can be challenging, especially in light of recent uncertainty.While […]

Customer Segments / Growth Strategies / Lighting / Lighting2 / Marketing / Sales Channel

EMCOR Shows the Way for Electrical Distributors

David Gordon Posted On September 25, 2008

Yesterday there was an interesting ad in The Wall Street Journal. An electrical and mechanical contractor, EMCOR, with almost $7 billion in revenues of which about 25% is electrical, was advertising their services. While the reasons are obvious – developers […]

Branding / Industry Consolidation / Marketing / Pricing / Productivity / Supplier / Products

Advance, Maurice, Private Labeling, Credit and More in Reading Roundup

David Gordon Posted On September 14, 2008

Cleaning out the office and the newsletters we receive and wanted to share some observations: Tedmag.com and Bill Attardi’s EnergyWatch alluded to Philips changing the name of Advance Transformer to Philips Lighting Electronics. We asked a couple of distributors about […]

Marketing / Reps / Sales Channel

The New Manufacturer Marketer … Reps

David Gordon Posted On September 3, 2008

The recent issue of NEMRA’s Hot Wire had an interesting article on the marketing role that reps are now undertaking on behalf of a number of manufacturers: Representatives Shoulder the Marketing TaskMany NEMRA reps report that as a result of […]

Growth Strategies / Marketing / Profitability

Retaining Market Development Funds (MDF)

David Gordon Posted On August 21, 2008

I was speaking with a distributor last week regarding the opportunity to speak to their salespeople, and probably suppliers, at their upcoming Field Marketing Summit. Their desired topic is “How marketing can help / The role of marketing“. Our conversation […]

Marketing / Pricing / Profitability / Supplier / Products

Continuing the Discussion on Private Labeling

David Gordon Posted On August 19, 2008

Interesting article in this month’s TED magazine entitled “The Myths of Buying Foreign Off-Brands” (article is not online). Interesting for a couple of reasons: The article is in TED, an association publication that includes manufacturers as affiliate members. This is […]

Branding / Marketing

Improving Your Website Visibility Inexpensively

David Gordon Posted On August 11, 2008

For distributors who seek to position themselves as information providers and manufacturers who recognize that contractors and end-users are more frequently turning to websites for more comprehensive information, company websites are becoming more important and more robust. The challenge, unfortunately, […]

Growth Strategies / Marketing / Pricing / Profitability / Reps / Sales Channel

“It’s only worth what I can sell it for!”

David Gordon Posted On August 5, 2008

At one time or another most distributors have used this famous quote when dealing with the tax man. There is a companion statement/plea that also is used: “I don’t care what I paid for it, it is only worth “x”. […]

Awards / Customer Segments / Lighting / Lighting2 / Marketing / Sales Channel

Reading Roundup

David Gordon Posted On July 6, 2008

Lutron, Leviton, Philips, the hardware industry and North Dakota were in recent articles we’ve read. Below are the items of interest: “Lutron says dimmed halogen bulbs are better than compact fluorescents ” was the headline on www.dvice.com. The article goes […]

Customer Segments / Lighting / Lighting2 / Marketing

An Energizing Future for the Electrical Industry

David Gordon Posted On July 1, 2008

A recent article in Forbes posed this question, “What happens when you don’t build more power plants?” and we’ll add “and the future of the automotive industry is electric cars”. Combine the two, plus the fact that electricity usage is […]