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:

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.
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.
A blurring of functions within the firm as marketing and other functions are more integrated through technology.
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.

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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 use the term

33. Product

Companies address customer needs by putting forth a value proposition, a set of benefits that satisfy those needs. The intangible value proposition is made physical by an offering, which can be a combination of products, services, information, and experiences. Product is anything capable of satisfying human wants. A product is anything we can offer to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a need or want. Thus, a product may be a physical good like a cereal, tennis racquet, or automobile; or a service such as an airline, bank, or insurance company. A product could also be a retail outlet like a department store, specialty store, or supermarket; a person such as a political figure, social media celebrity, entertainer, or professional athlete; an organization like a nonprofit, trade organization, or arts group; or a place including a city, state, or country; or even an idea like a political or social cause. We can define five levels of meaning for a

08. Products and Services marketing together

The service-dominant logic suggests that the separation between products and services is not a clear one. The ‘servicisation’ of products refers to the relative importance of the service dimension in a given product offering. Thinking in marketing has moved from a strategy that conceives of either a product or a service to one which sees both product and service dimensions in any market offering. Many products have a service component and many services have product components. Take for example a physical product such as a car. We purchase a car, which provides the service of getting from one place to another. But the car comes with its own need for services such as insurance, finance, repairs and even a petrol station. The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has built a service into its cars that alerts the driver if they are falling asleep. What a great service! Another example is a mobile phone provider such as Nokia. The company provides a product (mobile phone handsets) but als

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