« ‘Questionnaire Design’ Given 5 Stars on Amazon Business To Business Marketing – Part 2 of 3 »Business to Business Marketing – Part 1 of 3 By Paul Hague, Nick Hague and Matt Harrison of B2B International Ltd. FOUR FACTORS THAT MAKE BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS MARKETING SPECIAL Is business-to-business marketing really different to marketing to the general public? Does it really require a different approach to consumer marketing? Since marketing is about the profitable satisfaction of needs, aren’t the fundamentals of getting the right product to the right person, at the right price, exactly the same – isn’t it only the detail that is different? In this paper we argue that although there is a cross over, business-to-business marketing is different from consumer marketing in deep and fundamental ways and this most certainly affects the way that b2b marketing should be carried out. As always, we must be clear about our definitions. What are business-to-business markets? To answer this question it is useful to consider the value chain that starts with a consumer demand and from which dozens of business products or services are required. Take the example of the simple shirts that we buy. They do not arrive in the shops by accident. There is a value chain of enormous complexity that begins with cotton or some other fibre that must then be woven into cloth, that in turn is machined into a garment, packed and distributed through various levels until finally we pick it from the shelf. This is illustrated in the diagram below. We call this the chain of derived demand since everything to the left hand of the shirt is pulled through as a result of the demand for the product. Businesses sell cotton to merchants who sell it to spinners who sell it to weavers who sell it to garment makers and so on. None of the businesses buy the products for pure indulgence. They buy them with the ultimate aim of adding value in order that they can move the products down the chain until they finally reach us, the general public. The Chain Of Derived Demand
Business-to-business marketing is therefore about meeting the needs of other businesses, though ultimately the demand for the products made by these businesses is likely to be driven by consumers in their homes. There are four key factors that make business-to-business markets special and different to consumer markets: •The decision making unit is far more complex in business-to-business markets than in consumer markets We will take each in turn in the next part of this article. This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under Advertising Research, Articles, Market Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Leave a Reply |
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