B2Bridge

The past year, I have noticed that a lot of marketing scientists appreciate to openly discuss their field of research with marketing practicioners -- many of them even mention they want a more intense collaboration with the business arena for the sake of their own research. Vice versa, discussing marketing topics with scientists is often an eye-opening and knowledge deepening experience to me, and I hear similar voices from many colleagues. So far for the good news.

"If a customer wants to recommend you to other companies, the chances are higher that the customer is going to be a loyal customer in the future."

When you are trying to enter a new market, or launching a new product on an existing market, try to find the major influencers in the professional communities of your buyers first, before attacking the buying center members from the most promising clients.

This weekend, a friend of mine told me about an industrial customer explicitely asking him NOT to talk to a salesrep. "I do not fly to Belgium to talk to a salesman. I am only interested in visiting your site when I can meet with the CTO", were the words of his customer.

Although one should not network with the sole purpose of immediately doing business with the people one is networking with, it is a powerful means for getting introduced to people one does not easily get in touch with. And since business marketing is about direct sales and building a prospect and client base step by step, it is worth the effort to include networking in a business marketing plan.

Is a division between consumer and business marketing adequate? It suffices to look at brandchannel's 8 basic criteria to define business marketing to realise that business and consumer marketing are extremes in a spectrum, while a major part of marketing activities need a hybrid approach.

In some industrial organizations, corporate communications is a staff function with a direct reporting link to the executive committee, whereas marketing communications is part of the sales & marketing organization and hence reports to the sales & marketing manager -- or an executive with a similar title.

Is this split a good or a bad idea?

Early 2007, I gave my regular course on marketing planning for the introduction of high-tech innovations on industrial markets (Vlerick Leuven Ghent School of Management). As usual, I wanted to verify I had the right public in front of me. So my first question was "how many clients do you want to obtain by the end of this year?". The majority of the audience was aiming at one or two customers for their innovation by the end of this year. Others were dreaming of less than ten new clients. Only one customer was different with a couple of thousand new clients for his innovation. That was no surprise, since he was the only one aiming at a consumer audience.

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.

"My boss built his carreer in consumer marketing, and he now uses his old tricks like branding and image marketing in our business arena. I told him this world is different, but he does not want to aknowledge he could be wrong on this matter. So we are spending loads of money on corporate campaigns with one of the leading agencies, rather than spending time and money on individual relationship building."