Lecture Twenty One: Understanding the Business Customer - B2B Marketing

The final lecture had us look at and understand the differences of B2B marketing over B2C marketing. I think this gave us a good contrast and a chance to understand how the marketing strategies are similar between the both. The first thing to understand is that there is definitely many more products and money in the B2B market and this is down to the fact that the business market also includes consumer products as larger companies much first sell consumer products to wholesalers or retailers before they can be sold to the consumer.

You also find that within B2B markets the time it takes and the importance of the purchase is allot higher, this is mainly due to the amount of money involved in the purchase and that the market contains fewer but larger buyers. As the risk is increased in these sorts of purchases companies will employ a team of people to decide whether to buy a product or not. The growth of the business market also has a tendency to grow from derived demand by where the demand on one company by the consumers drives the demand of that company one the company that they buy products off. It's because of this derived demand that some business marketers will play on because if a company wants to increase its sales it can make itself known to consumers which will then drive demand on the company the they want to sell to. It is all very well thought and planned and allot more exciting than B2C marketing sometimes.

The way marketing budgets are spent in B2B markets also differ from B2C because in consumer markets Sales Promotion and Advertising take a large chunk of the budget but in business markets Personal Selling and Sales Promotion take the forefront; this is simply down to the fact that there is no real need for business to spend masses of money advertising to other businesses, businesses will come to you if they want your product so it is then down to the skills of the personal seller to final close a deal. On the back of the Personal Selling head comes the fact that there is increased focused on CRM(Customer Relationship Management) because there are far fewer buyers that you cannot afford to loose so a trustful relationship is often built between seller and buyer in B2B markets.

The geographical location of the buyers in B2B markets is also very concentrated and very often most customers will know each other. This will be because they are all based in the same area.

The Business Buying Behaviour

When compared with consumer buying behaviour, business buying behaviour is allot more professional and you will never find a company buying a product on impulse. This is because as I mentioned briefly above there will be a team dedicated to making the purchase who will follow a strict set of guidelines that the company will have in place to make sure that a purchase is well thought first. To better understand how the purchase is made you need to understand the different types of roles that are taken within the purchasing team; already covered in the blog talking about the family the purchasing team takes on some of these roles, they are:

• Influencers- These people are the ones that make sure all the specifications are defined and provide any information on alternatives. The views of the influencers generally tend to carry weight on the final decision, hence the name.


• Buyers- The buyer as the name suggests is the appointed person to make the actual purchase so they are the ones involved with selecting a seller and negotiating a deal.


• Deciders- Will generally have informal/formal power to select or approve sellers but in most cases the final decision is still made buy the buyer.


• Gatekeepers- Control the overall flow of information to others.

Another thing to consider is that there is a deference between the major factors that influence the business buyer and the regular consumer market buyer. Below is the tables for both factors.



The final model to consider is Kotler's Buying Process as again they differ between B2B and B2C.