Everyone loves to bad mouth big retailers. Their buyers are notorious for demanding more margin, for insisting on extra marketing development funds, for forcing price drops.

Today this image is not confined to personal anecdote, but has become a powerful media image, as organic farmers and craft producers in Europe and the USA line up to recount their personal horror stories. In France it is even the subject of a comedy movie - La Verite Si Je Mens II.

For many suppliers, things are getting worse, not better. "Buyers know that to get promoted they have to force margins down by 2 percentage points. Both buyers and salespeople change jobs more and more frequently, so it becomes increasingly difficult to form strong relationships," says Michael Trupp, who heads up Interactive Ideas, a British games software distributor.

"Today there is an MDF rate card with a fixed price."

Suppliers also say that retailers are increasingly insisting that they spend extra money on marketing development funds (MDF). Jo Wood at Mediagold, which represents a number of software publishers in Europe, says: "A few years ago, MDF would have been a discretionary item - today there is an MDF rate card with a fixed price." Some companies have become so bruised, that they have given up trying. In IT alone, names like Amstrad simply decided that it was impossible to make money selling through big retailers.

And yet there are signs of change. As the recent VIA survey of senior retail managers shows, they are willing and ready to change. PC World, one of Europe's largest information technology retailers, even went so far as to promise change at its last conference.

"PC World showed two slides. In the first, the supplier was kneeling in supplication at the foot of the buyer. In the second, both were on their feet. PC World says that this is how things will be from now on," says Wood.

Other vendors say that specialist stores are beginning to change their approach. Said one: "Specialist retailers have come to appreciate that, long-term, they may not be able to compete on price with food retailers, who benefit from much higher foot traffic. So they need to differentiate themselves by offering different products and greater expertise. They are prepared to partner to get that."

Many suppliers will be laughing hollowly at this point. And indeed, even Michael White at VIA, the author of research suggesting that retailers want alliances with suppliers (see page 5), says that today almost all supplier-retailer relationships are still stuck in the traditional, confrontational negotiation around price.

Yet, if you scratch the surface, it is quite easy to find suppliers who have cracked retail by forming closer relationships with stores and through creative marketing and branding.

This is possible even with basic standard commodities such as read/write CDs and other data storage media, as Memorex shows. By sponsoring MTV and developing cool and whacky packaging, it has developed a product range which it can sell at a high price to the youth market which all the major retailers are also trying to reach.

Cracking retail can be immensely lucrative. Take Symantec, the anti-virus software vendor. In December it outsold Microsoft in value through UK retailers, and on average its sales are up around 40pc to 50pc year-on-year. That compares to year-on- year growth of 10pc to 15pc for anti-virus software in general. SymantecÕs strategy has been to push its name as the expert in security software, and to back that up with comprehensive training programmes for retail staff.

So how do you win at retail?

"Most suppliers are still driven entirely by quarterly targets. The purchasing managers can see and smell the desperation."

Suppliers say that a clear, long-term strategy is essential. That may sound obvious, but all too often suppliers' retail strategies are simply a set of ambitious sales goals based on projected marketshare figures.

Mike Trupp at Interactive Ideas says: "Most suppliers are still driven entirely by quarterly targets. The purchasing managers can see and smell the desperation. You have to be able to think long term."

Kuerten at Memorex says clear thinking is the foundation: "For Memorex, there were three factors - we wanted the programme to be Pan-European, we had a limited budget and we wanted results to be measured by both sell-in and sell-through at retailer level." These criteria led Memorex to sponsor MTV across Europe.