Skip to main content

22. Business markets

 Companies selling business goods and services often face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive offerings. Advertising and Web sites can play a role, but the sales force, the price, and the seller’s reputation may play a greater one.

 The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2022 [+ New Data]

The term business, business-to-business or industrial marketing focuses on understanding business buying centres and on how businesses purchase in different ways to consumers – further explored in Chapter 8. Business markets are now networked organizations operating in a complex environment. Nowadays the focus is on neither consumer or business markets but on recognizing that the lines between the two are blurring in four important ways:

  1. A blurring of value chains through outsourcing and other relationships that allows networks of companies and customers to operate. When Apple set up its iTunes online music store, it brought together recording companies with music and customers who wanted to download music tracks for €0.99 – a mix of consumer and business-to-business marketing for Apple.
  2. A blurring of relationships with customers, as customers are invited to participate with companies in the design and delivery processes. The decline in travel agencies as customers book directly with airlines and hotels is an example.
  3. A blurring of functions within the firm as marketing and other functions are more integrated through technology.
     
  4. A blurring of products, services and customer experience, moving from an ‘industrial’ base to a knowledge-based society. 

Pharmaceutical firms have long focused on business markets such as doctors, hospitals, clinics and insurance providers. In recent years, however, they have recognized the need to combine this approach with extensive campaigns to build consumer awareness and demand for new drugs and treatments. Rather than relying on channels to drive awareness, these companies work from the consumer side and the industrial side simultaneously to create sales in the middle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

19. What is a Market?

 Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (such as the housing market or the grain market). Five basic markets and their connecting flows are shown in below. Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services, and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers. Consumers sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services. The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer, and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services.     Each nation’s economy, and the global economy, consists of interacting sets of markets linked through exchange processes. Marketers view sellers as the industry and...
Post a Comment
Read more

18. Marketer and prospect

 A marketer is someone who seeks a response—attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation—from another party, called the prospect. If two parties are seeking to sell something to each other, we call them both marketers.   Marketers are skilled at stimulating demand for their products, but that’s a limited view of what they do. They also seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives. Eight demand states are possible: 1. Negative demand—Consumers dislike the product and may even pay to avoid it. 2. Nonexistent demand—Consumers may be unaware of or uninterested in the product. 3. Latent demand—Consumers may share a strong need that cannot be satisfied by an existing product. 4. Declining demand—Consumers begin to buy the product less frequently or not at all. 5. Irregular demand—Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. 6. Full demand—Consumers are adequately buying all products put int...
Post a Comment
Read more