B2B Vs. B2C Marketing

Introduction

According to the American Marketing Association, "Marketing is an organizational function and set of a processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in a way that benefits the organization and its stakeholders" (2006). In other words, it is how a company determines what a customer's needs are and gears its products or services towards those needs in a way that their customers perceive value and the company makes money. Marketing can be broken down into two areas, between businesses and individual customers (B2C) and between businesses and businesses (B2B). When most people think of marketing, they picture consumer products being promoted through large advertising campaigns. While that area might be publicly perceived to be the largest area in marketing, the (B2B) market is actually much larger. According to researchers, "forecasters expect domestic B2B purchases will total several trillion a year" compared to "$269 billion expected [for] 2005" (American Marketing Association, 2006). The following paper will look at some of the differences between marketing on a B2B and a B2C website.

Marketing Strategy

When a company is creating its strategy for marketing, they "must consider both the nature of their products and the nature of their potential customers" (Schneider, 2004, p. 156). What a company is trying to sell or who they are trying to sell it to will help to determine how they market their product or service. A B2C site aims to sell its product or service to an individual end user, so they "organize their websites from an internal viewpoint, that is, according to the way that they arranged their product design and manufacturing processes" (Schneider, 2004, p. 158), which is a product based strategy. They may include categorized lists of all their available products and/or services on their website for users to search through, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. An example of this type of marketing strategy is the OfficeMax website, where there are several different categories of office supply materials, each with its own products. A B2B site, on the other hand, is based on a consumer based strategy. Because they have to meet the exact needs of a variety of different types of customer, they cannot base their marketing on a few products or services. Instead, they need to be geared to working with the client to provide their customized needs.