Dow Corning has been a market leader in silicon technology applications for over 50 years. Its products span many market applications in electronics, construction, health care and a multitude of industrial applications. However, as some of its product-market applications reached the mature stage of the product life cycle they became less competitive. Dow Corning’s full service consultative engineering approach did not work in more mature, price-sensitive market applications, and it was not profitable for Dow to pursue these customers as they represented a majority of target customers but only represented 20% of the revenue potential for the total market for their products.

1. Dow developed a different marketing mix and an e-marketing channel for the more price sensitive segment. Which operational component of the channel performance did Dow improve? Why?

2. Dow also distributes its products directly to customers in the innovation/technology segment but finds that use of wholesale distributors and dealers more efficient in reaching the service quality segment. What type of channel system does this illustrate?

a) direct channel system
b) indirect channel system
c) alternative channel system
d) mixed channel system
e) intermediate channel system

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Improving Operational Component Dow Corning likely improved the Efficiency of Channel Operations b... View the full answer