The new marketplace

Not too long ago, if you wanted a new briefcase, you would look for one in either a department store or a luggage shop. Today, you can just as easily make your purchase at a flea market, from a street vendor, from a mail-order catalog, from a direct mail offer, through a TV shopping service or via your computer shopping database.

Concerned about your health? Aside from your traditional an­nual physical and health-club membership, you can visit a spa, adopt one or more of the hundreds of do-it-yourself diets, utilize home exercise and diagnostic equipment, buy instructional videotapes, subscribe to any or all of the dozens of health maga­zines on the market, or consult a homeopath, a nutritionist, or any of dozens of nontraditional practitioners.

Consumers are increasingly seeking out new sources for goods and services; that is no longer news. What is news is that they are bypassing traditional delivery channels — corner drugstores, doctors' offices, the mass media — in their search for quality, savings, convenience, and personal fit in all products and serv­ices. This movement to cut out the traditional middleman, so to speak, is a part of a massive socioeconomic phenomenon known as disintermediation.

Disintermediation is fueled by people's intense and widening desire to be more in control. Most people occasionally feel help­less and victimized. But in the marketplace, you can be a king or a queen - your ability to choose gives you power.

What is behind this booming growth in the trend toward bypassing traditional markets? Time has become an important consumer issue. Growing numbers of working women, overworked executives and moon-lighters among the people are increasingly willing to pay more money for things that save their time. Companies that handle household chores such as gardening, auto maintenance, and housecleaning are proliferating. Food companies have lost billions of dollars to fast-food chains over the years and are trying to recapture these dollars by providing supermarkets with prepared meals. Door-to-door sales are being replaced by catalogs that consumers can thumb through at their convenience. The ability to deliver goods and services when and where the customer chooses is crucial to success in the new marketplace.

No wonder that hundreds of new distribution channels and outlets are springing up every month, from discount stores and warehouses to upscale boutiques and home delivery, from specialty dealers to hypermarkets. And consumers have generally not only responded well to alternatives, they have come to ex­pect and demand the diversity.

The proliferation of media, and of advertisements in media, has created a background of constant noise, out of which con­sumers increasingly select only those messages of direct interest to them. The consumer is no longer the passive recipient of advertising that marketers were used to in the past. Now, consum­ers control what gets through to them and what doesn't.

Today producers and sellers are competing in a mature, over­stocked, intensely competitive environment where products and advertisements look too much alike - a serious problem in an increasingly splintered marketplace. With shelf space and consumers' attention at a premium, the shots are now being called not by the producer but by the consumer and by the distributor who is oriented to what is new.

In-home systems such as TV, computers, and catalogs provide portability of time and place, convenience of use, relaxation, soli­tude, and time saving. Out-of-store sales now account up to a third of all retail sales. To compete, stores must try to match the conven­ience and time saving offered by direct marketing. A major break­through before the end of the decade may be scanning systems that enable shoppers to check themselves out, thus avoiding the major disadvantage of in-store shopping — waiting on line to pay.