Business-to-business marketing involves one business marketing products and
services to another for its own use. Abbreviated to B2B marketing, this newly
emerging market and discipline has not received as much attention as business
marketing to end consumers, known as B2C marketing. The appeal of everyday
consumer goods such as cars, perfumes, chocolate, and fashion clothes plays a
more integral role in our everyday lives; whereas we, as consumers, don’t tend to
think about products such as chemicals, component parts, aggregates and capital
equipment in quite the same way.
Business marketing, however, has enormous hidden depths covering many
more industrial and commercial transactions along the supply chain than many
students and practitioners might imagine. If all interactions were considered –
from raw material suppliers, agents, distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers and
business buyers – then we would see that B2B markets are substantially larger and
often more valuable than B2C markets and, surprisingly enough, they can be just
as interesting. Since a large percentage of business and marketing students will
land careers in the industrial and commercial sector, this book was written with
them in mind.