Business To Business Marketing

Business to business marketing took a radical shift when the concept was completely revamped in the late 70's and early 80's. Until then, the focus was on the product and keeping the close of the sale the main focus. The idea that marketing strategies would have to be somewhat different when corporations wanted to do commerce with other companies appeared as something of an epiphany for corporate America. There were, even in the early 20th century, trade associations and corresponding magazines and related informational venues. But in the 80's and 90's, as more and more young and bright students began looking at the possibilities of cyberspace commerce and the accompanying emerging discipline of high speed data available with a myriad of informational angles and tangents, marketing has taken on the level of being, in many ways, as much of a science as the door to door salesman has become a dinosaur.

Trade shows used to be the only forum available for real business advertising and networking. Warriors of profit would say goodbye to their families for a week at a time, travel long distances and be on company stages for 12-16 hours a day pitching their particular product. Other industry persons of often unrelated avenues of commerce and enterprise were able to shuffle the aisles, stuffing suit pockets with samples and brochures and be dazzled with extravagant displays of aesthetic bravado, all meant to give the impression that every company would be in existence until men had lived on Mars for three hundred years. Information was exchanged in terms of products, but little about the culture, the horizons and the frightening paucity of cutting edge ideas with one another.

There has been the stereotyped image of the salesman who is more intent on making a sale than on listening to the needs of the customer. Humorous pictures of a salesman trying to sell a sports car to a family of seven harkens up the doltish attitude of selling without listening. But the marketing science of the 90's and the 21st century has taught commerce organizations that without first knowing the ethos and the vision of the targeted company, all the business to business marketing in the world will fail. More and more enlightened companies are demanding that vendors and suppliers first intimately understand where their business moccasins have stepped before signing any deal worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The result has been a revolution in business advertising.

When one thinks about it, selling to a single consumer or to a large corporation have many common experiences. Advertising and marketing have to make a would-be consumer hungry for the product. A home appliance manufacturing giant must convince only the lone consumer who stands before the gleaming stainless steel refrigerator that she really needs it. Unless, of course, she has to go home and convince her husband who really had his heart set on a new bass boat! But the fly in the ointment for business to business marketing is that it must not only convince perhaps a buyer on the second floor who can see the vision of the product's value, but also a boardroom full of executives on the top floor of headquarters.

Since each of those persons in the boardroom will look at opportunities and ideas with the filter of one's own experiences, business to business marketing has evolved to embrace the emotional and visceral dimension of connecting. As more and more companies move from a top down paradigm of leadership to a more team and lateral approach, individual differences and ways of perception are fully embraced and encouraged. This change in organizational flowcharts gives more incentive to marketers to go after the emotion of industry decision makers as much as touting the financial rewards. Business advertising relies a great deal on the 1:1 interaction that occurs when emails are passed along containing good or great ideas. Perhaps innovative video that someone saw somewhere or a great piece of copywriting or a particularly compelling ad gets moved from person to person along the food chain until there is enough consensus to bring about a sale.

Of course, identifying particular trade needs is part of a business to business marketing plan. Emotion alone won't bring success. As part of a company's contextual total content strategy, the company will seek to latch on to those websites most viewed by middle or upper management of other companies. Those decision makers may often use terms such as profit improvement or improvement software as keywords in internet searches. As a result, pop up ads or links may appear promoting new products or services that may meet net user's needs. "For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." (Matthew 24:27)

Business advertising is not selling products; it is rather about selling a relationship. Take the time to carefully view large accounting firms or information technology companies or healthcare providers' media advertisements. They are often less like commercials and more like therapy sessions with a psychologist. The ad can leave the viewer scratching his or her head asking, "What was that commercial all about?" Those kinds of B2B to ads are like an inside joke: no one but the privileged few really understands the meaning, and so it was designed for such an affect. Look for advertising in the future to become more and more tunnel focused.