Physical goods flow from the manufacturers to the warehouse, to the retail stores, and finally into the consumers shopping carts. Manufacturers try to influence this flow of goods via marketing programs aimed at the retailers and at the consumers. They impact retailers via sales calls, business reviews, deal offers, price changes, suggested shelf arrangement, and new items. In addition, some of them provide merchandising support to the retail stores. In return, these manufacturers want to retailers to provide good prices to the consumers, along with big promotional displays, large shelf areas, big and frequent advertising features, and special retail coupons.
Manufacturers also work to impact consumers directly through promotions and advertising.
In the mass marketing era, they took the direct route, at least most of the time. Most of their marketing budgets went into consumer advertising, with consumer promotions getting the next largest chunk, followed by retailer promotional efforts. This world evolved over time, as described in the pieced titled Death Wish Marketing. This was pretty much a reversal of the old rule, and it proved to be more difficult to implement. This is not very labor intensive and thus easy for a centralized marketing group to implement.