Take a few moments to brush up on your marketing knowledge by discovering more about business-to-business marketing attributes you might not have considered before.
If you take a bit of time to contemplate the types of decisions involved as well as the decision process, you'll come to appreciate the critical qualities of B2B. Purchasing decisions are normally very complicated and they frequently involve efforts from the supplier to adapt the product to the buyers needs to help the process go more smoothly. Usually, in a B2C environment you’re presented with a ready-made product that you decide to buy or not. Additionally, the getting procedure tends to be quite formalised and has to follow a certain convention, primarily so that the purchase can be accounted for properly. The most exciting thing to start thinking about to business-to-business is that long-term relationships are highly valued. This comes out of the fact that buyers are fewer but likewise larger, ergo individually more instrumental. Going over a company like WPP will give you a sense of what sorts of customers they deal with. This naturally helps inform B2B marketing strategies.
In regard to contemplating the buying unit involved, there are quite a couple of things to be said for business-to-business marketing. There are normally more decision making units in the getting process, meaning more people are involved in the buying decision than in a B2C environment. When you order a chocolate bar, you alone are involved in the procedure. By contrast, in B2B, there will be multiple departments involved. Moreover, the buying effort will be even more professional than the one you’d find in a B2C environment. When you look at companies like Boeing, or other types of B2B companies whose primary customers are other providers, you’ll view that this happens to be very much the case that they deal with lots of people when seeking to sell airplanes.
About the most fascinating ways to take into account with regard to firm to company marketing is the total market structure and demand. Where business-to-consumer is characterised by a very huge number of buyers who tend to be smaller, the business-to-business market is actually full of fewer buyers who tend to be larger. Fascinatingly, their demand for products is generally derived rather than direct, meaning it happens to be dictated by final consumer demand – this seriously shows how B2B happens to be reliant upon B2C. However, quite crucially, despite this link, the B2B sector finds itself in a market where there happens to be fairly inelastic demand – in other words, price changes don’t impact it all that much. Sibur happens to be a company that works in this industry primarily, seeing as it happens to be involved in production processes of all sorts. Look to other B2B companies as well if you want to watch more examples.