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A different mix?
The differences between business and consumer marketing should also be apparent in marketing communications planning. Here are some basic distinctions I have witnessed over the years. I would like to know if you agree with these marketing communications planning differences ... or disagree.
Consumer marketing communications planning focuses on obtaining brand awareness and creating brand loyalty. As a consequence of the large number of potential customers, consumer marketeers tend to spread a standard message to large communities of potential buyers -- or use a series of standard messages, each adapted to a specific target audience. The main budget flows into mass media campaigns.
Business marketeers tend to develop their marketing plans around the support of direct sales. With various database-centered direct marketing campaigns, they try to grasp the attention of individuals from their target market and to funnel them into a sales trajectory. The main budget flows towards sales (which includes the sales peoples salary) and sales support -- PR and web do get much attention and part of the budget too, but the branding budget is much smaller compared to the sales budget. Only when business marketeers are confronted with larger audiences, they too add more mass marketing campaigns.
Feel free to add your personal assessments.
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Hans,
your comment kept me puzzled for a while. Is government communications different from marketing communications? If government marketing means selling products or services to government bodies, the answer in my viewpoint is 'no'. But, you are not talking about selling products or services in your post, but about selling concepts and influencing the way people think about those concepts. I take the liberty to call it "lobbying" here, so that we do not mix with selling products to government organizations.
I first would like to make a distinction between tactics and communications in my respons to your post.
As for communications there are indeed many similarities in communications for lobbying and communications for business marketing. A complex message, a specialised subject, different levels of target audiences -- politicians e.g. speak a different languague than their higly specialised technocrates. And, given the larger audience, you would indeed use a communication mix that requires mass marketing techniques in order to reach your audience effectively. So yes, communications for lobbying seems close to communications for business marketing with a large audience, hence implies mass communications techniques.
However, on the level of strategy and tactics, I see there are more fundamental differences between lobbying and business marketing. First, the intention is different. It is not about selling products and services and building a relationship with large accounts, in order to obtain a mutual agreement on a particular contract. Even stronger, you do not need a close relationship to make people think differently. So it might a better strategy to try and influence large groups of people with your own pre-defined ideas, than to look for a small amount of important relations (unless you are trying to interfere directly with the voting on a law -- which then is more similar to business marketing). Since this is fundamentally different, I think you are right to call it a different kind of marketing, which requires a specific logic and specific communications mechanisms. So, just like the IMP Group did with business marketing in the seventies, you would have to investigate how the fundamental differences in strategy and tactics are working, in order to obtain the right communications mix. And probably, you will end up with a communications mix similar to the typical mix for business marketing, yet with specific differences that are a consequence of the fundamental differences in strategy and tactics.
Jan
There is probably a 3rd type of marketing, as performed by ngo's when campaigning for a cause, the non-profit sector when explaining their industry to 'decision makers', or government when explaining the impact of new regulation on particular professions.
It takes aspects from both business marketing (complex message, rational approach) and consumer marketing (large target groups, mass communication techniques).
I can only see web-based communication techniques as sufficiently flexible to bring complex messages to large and varied target audiences in a cost-effective way.