The Marketing Approach

Not so much a function, more a way of thinking about the business, is one of Gordon Wills' descriptions of PDM. In a characteristically witty and informative talk recently at a seminar organised by the Centre for PDM, he adopted the role of devil's advocate and offered sharp criticisms of the typical ‘marketing man’, whose awareness of the distribution function is sadly limited. “The marketing man must seek information about responses to levels of service”, says Gordon Wills. “He can tell you all about responses to advertising or to prices — but what does he know about service levels?”. And he went on to ask: is 100% service level always justified in terms of the investment and distribution costs it entails? The accounting side of the business also came in for some criticism. In Gordon Wills' view, accountancy is the Achilles Heel of the physical distribution philsophy; accountants have not taken sufficient interest in the costs of distribution. Traditionally they have been more concerned with costs of production and of course more recently with marketing costs. Cost accounting in distribution, in his own phrase, is a nightmare and if any one factor is going to hold back the progress of the physical distribution concept in industry, it is this. Following is a condensed version of the paper Gordon Wills delivered at the seminar.