Chapter Nine How do producers get their products and services to their target customers?
This area of the marketing mix is usually called distribution simply because its main concern is to distribute goods and services to the target customers. Organizations typically use a large number of strategies to get their goods and services to target customers rather than only one. Critical to understanding and managing distribution are the concepts of time and place utility. Time utility can be defined as having the product available when the customer would prefer to acquire it and place utility is having the product available where the customer would prefer to acquire it. While the internet can provide the ultimate in time utility for some products or services (for example, e-mail), for many products, it does not provide sufficient time utility. Buying a book over the internet still requires that the book be delivered to the buyer before consumption of the product. Therefore, it is generally faster to buy a book from a local retailer than to obtain the same book through the intern
