I really enjoyed this book by Harvard Business School professor Kash Rangan. The authors advocate a disciplined approach to channel strategy that could generate superior returns in almost any industry. In my experience, most manufacturers neither develop careful channel maps nor do they assign executives senior enough to make significant channel resource commitments. As a result, the returns to channel stewardship should be available for any company willing to invest the time and effort.
A major strength of this book is the detailed examples provided in each chapter. Most business books simply provide very short case studies that always leave me wondering what really happened. Here, Rangan and Bell combine company stories with market data. Some of the examples are a bit dated, but that has the advantage of allowing the authors to describe the actual outcomes. The examples include both retail (B2C) and business-to-business channels, showing the strength of channels thinking. They even provide fresh insights into overdone examples such as Dell and Wal-Mart.
The only shortcoming is an over reliance on box-and-arrow diagrams. These are helpful when showing product and information flows within a channel system, but much less interesting when simply summarizing points made in the text.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with channel management responsibilities. This dense and challenging book will reward careful study.