Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/999236
40 FEDA News & Views Out of the Box Back to the Future: Winning Through Community Collaboration By Contributor Mark Dancer, NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence Fellow mark.dancer@channelvation.com Way back when, in the supposed dark ages before the Internet, distributors and dealers were primarily local businesses. Manufacturers valued distributors for their ability to predict and manage inventory to meet local demand, and for building local relationships that were beyond the manufacturer's reach and expertise. Even large distributors were considered a collection of local branches, each firmly embedded in their local community. Digital and online technologies have changed this paradigm. In response to competitive threats like Amazon and other far-away businesses that steal local business, distributors have put up their own e-commerce platforms and webstores, enabling them to sell to any customer, anytime, anywhere. Manufacturers used to complain when a distributor sold outside its local market. Today, territory restrictions are hard to enforce and, in many cases, an irrelevant or problematic channel management tool. e siren's song of doing business online may match evolving customer buying preferences, but pursuing digital opportunities has had the unintended and unfortunate effect of causing many distributors to abandon a true and sustainable competitive advantage. Online disruptors can be many things, but they cannot be a local business. Instead, disruptors seek to attract business away from local providers, remove the human element of doing business, aggregate demand and compete on scale. Distributors, as local, humancentric businesses, can compete—not as they did before the Internet—but by redefining what it means to be local, thereby winning the hearts, minds and spend of a local community. In a creative and far-reaching conversation with Marc Israel, president of Great Lakes Hotel Supply, we explored four areas in which distributors can disrupt the disruptors by focusing on collaborating with their local community. Success, says Israel,