Susan D. Kirby on "Planning Product Distribution"

Where are you going to put that product? What pathway -- we call it a life path point -- are you going to put it in so that you make it easy, convenient, accessible, for people to do the behavior. If you don't make it easy and convenient and accessible, it just makes it that much harder for people to do it; so you need to constantly be thinking about where is my target audience? What do they do in the course of a regular day? What are their life path points? Where can I put this product or behavior so that it makes it easier for them to do it?

A good example would be mammography for low-income women. At a time when we didn’t have mobile mammography, if you were asking a woman to drive 50 miles to a distant city she didn’t know, learn her way around, and go to a big fancy hospital, and try to get a mammogram, the distribution variable was way out of whack with what was the regular, normal routine of this woman. So trying to find it plausible that some people would do that on a regular basis was pretty hard to do. So mobile mammography just changed that whole environment. That was addressing a place variable -- making mammograms much more available, convenient, accessible for low-income women or for women who worked and had a very difficult time getting off work to be able to get a mammogram. So bringing it literally right to their workspace made it so much more easy and convenient.

…when you do your first or second round of research, you should be trying to find out where does your audience spend their time. What are their life path points? So then you can try to match that to, “Okay, well, we have a condom that we want to get out to folks. What are the most likely places that they're naturally going to be that'll make it easy for us to get it in their life path point? Or are there places that are easily-enough accessed off of that, kind of branches off of a life path point, that you can be sure you're going to make it easy for them to get to?”

….one of the things you need to think about is how well this particular product matches your target audience's life path points. And that's one of the reason you do the research early on with your target audiences because you can find out the life path points that are comfortable and familiar for them that don't feel out of place; and the other one is because you want the product to somewhat match its surroundings. You don't want to be out of place with something any more than most people would want you to advertise beer in the milk section at a grocery store or have beer available in the milk section; it doesn’t kind of go there.

Sometimes it's fun when people do something that's a little off, as in when Perrier was introduced and it was in the soft drink section and people went, “What's that?” That kind of got their attention of why is water in the soft drink section. And, of course, today there's a whole new category of bottled water. But, at the same time, you can't be so off when you have a small advertising budget and a small everything budget to try to make things fit, and you usually don't have ten years to make headway with something like that. Perrier probably took a decade before they created a whole new category of bottled water. So it's a fine line, and that's one of the reasons you need some of the research and good judgment about where is the best place to place this product? Where can I make it available for folks? And you often find them.

I think one of the key reasons pilot testing is important -- and it is to all of the decisions that you make -- but one of the key reasons it's important to the place variable is because it's one of the things that's pretty difficult to change once you've negotiated partnership agreements or things where you're going to have certain behaviors available in certain ways or certain products available in certain spaces, if it's retail space or public space, it's pretty hard to pull those plans back in and it's hard to change the position you might have created in the user's mind. If you're going to make condoms in a sense available only through doctors' offices, that sends a certain messages about what condoms are used for and all the attributes and associations people may have with condoms versus you can buy a condom in any 7-Eleven. I mean, that carries a whole different set of attributes and associations people have with it. So the pilot testing really gives you data on two things. Was it acceptable to the target audience? And, if you test a couple of different ways of distribution, you may find the one that does the best job -- one distribution channel that seems to be the best absolute channel. Or you may find they're all equally effective. In that case, I mean, all of that is good information to have for planning. Without that, you're just kind of figuring, “Well, I'll put it in the Band-Aid aisle and maybe it’ll work in the Band-Aid aisle, when maybe it really belonged in the women's section or near the magazines and that might have worked a whole lot better for you.”

…the #1 problem I see over and over again in being asked to evaluate case studies or look at someone's project plans, anything, is that they always confuse the distribution of messages with the distribution of the product. And, if anything, people get crystal clear on that -- that they're two separate things, and that you need both. It's not that you don't need distribution of messages. You need that. But where you distribute messages -- if it's broadcast radio, TV, or the classroom -- are really different issues than how you might make the behavior much more accessible and convenient and easy for people to do.

… .in terms of kind of pitfalls or advice for folks that are just beginning to get started in this area is look at how other products are being distributed that are similar to what you're trying to do, or other types of behaviors that are similar? How are they being distributed? If the target audiences are fairly similar, it can give you some good ideas. I think we often try to do way more research than is necessary. If we would just look at the obvious natural surroundings, sometimes I think we would find what retailers have already spent a lot of money on and we can kind of borrow their findings more or less or find the product sector partner to come in that has a very similar sort of behavioral or placement strategy going on and see what you can find out from them if you can. So I think there are some shortcuts to getting the information that you need and making some good decisions. And, of course, I would always say you probably need some data and some pilot testing; it would make the most sense for you to have a little bit of a sense of security in making some decisions and to have something to back up why you are doing what you are. Otherwise, you're pretty much flying by the seat of your pants.