Contenu du sommaire : Cahier : Intermédiation dans les canaux de distribution : vers un renouveau ?

This research proposes an integrated model of the relational consequences of retailer personality. Seven personality traits (out of nine) of the retailer considered, Fnac, have a direct impact, positive or negative, on at least one of the studied relational consequences: trust, attachment, affective commitment and continuance commitment. Moreover, they have an indirect impact on affective commitment and continuance commitment through trust and attachment. This research thus highlights the managerial implication of the concept of retailer personality. This concept could help retailers to manage their retail-brand and to create, maintain and strengthen the relationship with their customers.

This article deals with the evaluation of brand extensions targeting children from 8 to 12. After a qualitative phase, we examine how brand breadth impact children's attitude toward the brand extension. The results of an experiment show the direct and positive impact of the brand breadth on children's attitude toward the brand extension and the moderating role of age. In conclusion, we present implications, limits and future research.

The information system (IS) is a key characteristic of organization. It has different aspects corresponding to the different types of organization and the different period. In its current form, technology has a significant influence by creating rules and regulations. This document aims firstly at describing the IS and the consequences of technology specifically in the creation process of regulations. Secondly, It aims at helping actors to have a critical point of view of there is.

This research aims at understanding how companies make changes in the way they plan their operations when they have to deal with an uncertain environment, especially when demand becomes unpredictable. Looking at a case study in the IT industry, we try to explain what actions the company takes in order to adapt itself to market variability, and more particularly, we focus on the evolution of the planning system in a crisis context. The results of this research show that the management of the resources coupled with a total redesign of the supply chain are substitutes to common planning tools in order to ensure the perpetuity of the company in a strongly evolutionary context.

Since the revitalization of economic sociology operated in the 1980s, an interorganizational networks perspective has been widely used in the study of interfirm partnerships. This paper aims to review this literature by distinguishing successively the influence of interorganizational networks on the formation, the implementation and the evolution of interfirm partnerships.

Marketing research has devoted more and more attention to the analysis of consumer behavior. Similarly, distribution research has focused on retailing and shopper behavior. But the dynamics of industrial and consumer goods markets, impacted by globalization and the internet, reveal a major reconfiguration of intermediaries in marketing channels. This article summarizes the major theoretical foundations of channel analysis drawn from economics, sociology of organizations, and strategic planning, to identify theoretical principles that may explain the changes in the functions of channel intermediaries, and their contribution to value creation in the channel.

Distribution channels have undergone considerable changes over the last thirty years in Western countries, in technological, economical and managerial ways. For some observers, it leads to an inevitable marginalization of the middlemen, including wholesalers and industrial distributors. Adopting a historical perspective, the article questions the relevance of this vision, and indicates that the contemporary developments of distribution channels lead to a more dynamic view of the logic of intermediation. The use of the interaction model developed by the IMP Group identifies new sources for value creation in which wholesalers and industrial distributors can be strongly involved.

Wholesaling (business to business intermediation) is rather neglected as an academic topic. Intermediaries are generally dealt with from the perspective of the manufacturers and producers: they are presented as choices to be made by these manufacturers and producers. Subsequently, there is an absence of works providing an analysis of wholesaling from the specific point of view of the wholesalers themselves. This lack of interest for the “wholesaler” itself, has led to an undifferentiated treatment of wholesaling and retailing under the generic header of “distribution” with an increasing importance given to retailing. Has it always been the same ? Drawing from an historical more than a managerial literature, the article purpose is to provide some historic landmarks (from antiquity to the present day) as for the distinctions operated between wholesaling and retailing, and in the position wholesaling in the economy, even, more generally, in society. It appears that, if wholesaling suffers from a negative image, this has not always been the case throughout history.

The BtoB intermediaries sector is seldom studied by management sciences. The rare works about this topic yet agree on the fact that this sector is undergoing noticeable evolutions. These evolutions are likely to impact the management of sales and marketing human resources. This article focuses on this specific issue. Building on a framework adapted from the human resources management literature, the discourses of twelve actors from the BtoB commercial functions are analyzed. The authors highlight several elements tending to prove that indeed, these functions – more or less easily – support the evolutions of their companies. These elements are presented as possible avenues for further research.

Issues related to urban logistics have taken a central place in management research. Longtime reduced to operational approaches, particularly in terms of optimal organization of the transport of goods in saturated cities, urban logistics attracts the attention of academicians and practitioners taken from original strategic models, focusing on the importance of resource pooling among firms in competition. Pooling is essential both from an economic and an ecological point of view, but poses major problems in terms of flow monitoring. The article specifically addresses the topic of intermediation in the context of urban logistics, in reference to stakeholders who can do it, primarily among the logistics service providers and wholesalers.