MacInnis (2011) has proposed that purely conceptual papers can make four basic types of contributions to the academic literature: envisioning, explicating, relating, and debating. Therefore, to gain more insight into the nature of contributions made so far by conceptual research papers in channels, we tally the numbers of conceptual papers making these four types of contributions with respect to each of the six research domains. Table 4 displays these data and we see that “explicating” is the most common form of contribution made by conceptual research papers in the marketing channels literature and then “envisioning”. According to MacInnis (2011), conceptual articles that contribute by way of explication include those that offer conceptual frameworks, structural frameworks, propositional inventories, and reviews of prior research in the targeted domain (e.g., Guiltinan, 1974). In contrast, envisioning articles identify new ideas, novel concepts and perspectives (e.g., Stern and Reve, 1980). Our finding that conceptual articles of the explicating type are most common in channels research literature is in keeping with MacInnis’s (2011, p. 151) observations about the state of conceptual articles in Marketing as a whole. It is also no surprise that envisioning conceptual articles in channels research are largely concentrated in the research domains of power-dependence, conflict, and relational outcomes which received a lot of early attention from channels scholars.