Omni-Channel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is often casually described as having several ways to reach an audience (online platforms, physical locations, social media) and making them work together. That description is accurate but incomplete, because it focuses on listing channels rather than examining what a channel does and crucially how combinations of channels can be orchestrated to achieve specific outcomes. This course focuses on the latter, by considering combinations of channels as a system that delivers the overall experience of interactions and transactions between the brand or organisation and its target segment or public. The combination of channels put to work by an organisation will perform five distinct and complementary functions, each of which will reinforce or undermine the marketing mix: information and communications, interaction, distribution, transaction, and care. Any of these may be performed by the organisation itself, by an intermediary, or by a platform; the party that performs a function usually controls the data it generates (whether as an controller or as a processor, in GDPR parlance); and each function carries decision rights that pass to whoever holds it.

That last point is where channel structure becomes strategy rather than logistics. The course examines what a given configuration determines in the marketing mix. Promotion corresponds closely to the first function, Place spans distribution and transaction, Process belongs to interaction and care, People is a question of who performs each function, and Physical evidence belongs to whoever performs the last three. Product and Price are the elements the configuration constrains most sharply: assortment rights travel with distribution, pricing and terms rights travel with transaction. A manufacturer selling through independent dealers cannot set a retail price; the same manufacturer under an agency arrangement can. Participants also examine how tightly product and channel are coupled, from offerings that exist independently of how they are sold, through those the channel materially alters, to those that are the performance of channel functions, as a marketplace or an AI assistant is.

Pricing under omnichannel conditions is treated as a distinct problem from pricing across multiple channels. Where multiple channels create a conflict problem (divergent prices, undercutting, distributor tension) simultaneous visibility largely forecloses divergence and moves the strategic question from price level to price architecture: which margin absorbs a discount earned in one channel and redeemed in another, how loyalty currency distributes cost across parties, and who bears the cost of a cross-channel return. Price transparency and buyer-side comparison tools have removed older forms of discrimination while personalised and dynamic pricing have introduced new ones, and the course treats the resulting ethical questions as economic ones.

The course then traces how each function has migrated between parties across successive aggregation layers, from traditional retail, to digital ecosystems, to platforms, and most recently to AI assistants that perform only the first two functions while increasingly determining which offerings a buyer ever considers. Real organisations are diagnosed throughout: brand owners who also distribute for others, manufacturers reclaiming direct relationships with their customers, and manufacturer-dealer arrangements in which title and possession are being deliberately separated. Participants apply the grid to their own organisations, in B2B and industrial settings as well as consumer ones.

Finally, the course turns to evidence and to what happens after the sale. Participants work with real journey data and test inherited models of the customer journey against it; they compute channel contribution in a spreadsheet using rule-based and probabilistic attribution methods, and find that the answer depends on an assumption (i.e. what one supposes happens to demand when a channel is removed) rather than on the arithmetic. Closing sessions address why care is a marketing function rather than an operations residue, what loyalty is worth when the arithmetic is done, and how returns, resale and trade-in create channels in which the customer becomes a supplier.

The course draws on the marketing-flows tradition in channel theory, of which the five-function model is a development, extended to cover two functions that tradition could not have anticipated.

• Knowledge:
  • Identify and define the key concepts of omnichannel marketing.
  • Define the five functions of a marketing channel and situate the elements of the marketing mix in relation to them.
  • Identify the parties that may perform each function, and the decision rights each function carries.
• Understanding:
  • Explain why the coexistence of multiple channels is a question of functional consistency rather than of channel count.
  • Describe how the separation of title from possession relocates pricing and terms rights.
  • Distinguish price competition across multiple channels from price coherence under omnichannel conditions.
  Application:
  • Apply the analytical grid to diagnose the channel configuration of a real organisation: who performs each function, who owns the data, what rights follow.
  • Derive from a configuration what the organisation can and cannot decide about assortment and price.
  • Compute channel contribution from journey data using rule-based and probabilistic attribution methods in a spreadsheet.
  Analysis:
  • Analyse how each function has migrated between parties across successive aggregation layers, and what each layer captured.
  • Assess the degree of coupling between an offering and the channel that carries it.
  • Distinguish what channel performance data can establish from what it cannot, and identify the interactions that remain unobserved.
• Summary:
  • Design an omnichannel configuration that aligns the five functions with an organisation's objectives and constraints.
  • Construct a business case for a change in channel configuration, including its cost and expected return.
  • Specify what a proposed configuration requires of the marketing mix.
  Evaluation:
  • Evaluate competing attribution models and justify the selection of one against a named alternative.
  • Critique an existing channel configuration and recommend a sequenced set of changes, with explicit acknowledgment of trade-offs.

These outcomes are sequenced to move participants from a shared analytical vocabulary toward the diagnostic, quantitative and evaluative judgment required to take decisions about channel structure rather than to describe it.

Required and Corequired knowledge and skills

Participants should have a working knowledge of marketing fundamentals, including the marketing mix, and an understanding of how marketing and sales operate within organisations. A short self-assessment is circulated before the first session; it is neither graded nor collected as assessment, and serves to calibrate the level at which foundational material is revisited during the course.

The course and its cases require sound analytical skills, the ability to synthesise, comfort with basic spreadsheet work, and the capacity to communicate reasoning and conclusions clearly in a structured manner.

• Interactive sessions built around structural questions rather than topic coverage
• Case discussion, with cases selected to expose distinct channel configurations
• A field research project carried out in groups across the course, with a mid-course clinic and a final presentation
• Quantitative exercises performed individually in a spreadsheet
• Discussion of situations covered in current media
• Application of the course's analytical grid to participants' own organisations

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

Recommended reading

• Building a Direct-to-Consumer Strategy Without Alienating Your Distributors
• Are Sales Incentives Becoming Obsolete?
• Advertising Analytics 2.0
• Channel conflict: when is it dangerous?

Optional references

• Marketing Channel Strategy: an Omnichannel Approach, 9th edition, Robert W. Palmatier, Eugene Sivadas, Louis W. Stern, Adel I. El-Ansary, 2019
• Think Shopper. Enduring Truths and New Rules for Marketers in An Omnichannel World, Eric G. Meunier, 2020
• Make It All about Me Leveraging Omnichannel and AI for Marketing Success By Rasmus Houlind, Colin Shearer, 2019
• Location is (still) Everything The Surprising Influence of the Real World on how We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One By David Richard Bell, 2014
• Marketing 5.0 Technology for Humanity By Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, Iwan Setiawan, 2021

Course notes

• Université virtuelle
• Podcast
• Syllabus

Additional information

Format of examination

• Preparation on an assigned subject and submission of a piece of work
• Group presentation and discussion with the teaching team

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• Personal work
• Oral examination
• Oral presentation
• Group work
• Written report

Personal work

Oral examination

• Examination with preparation

• Open question with long development

Oral presentation

Group work

Written report

Assessment criteria

• Quality of analysis
• Synthesis / precision
• Communication / clarity
• Collaboration / participation

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

The weighting will be as follows to determine your grade for this course:

• Individual analytical assignment: 15%.
• Field research project: 30%.
• Final examination: 45%.
• Participation: 10%.

Language(s) of evaluation

• french
• (if applicable english )