A Simple Plan
Published 2/8/2013
Author: Christine Birkner
Author Biography
Christine Birkner is a staff writer for
Marketing News. She can be reached at
cbirkner@ama.org.
Summary
The gulf between B-to-B marketing and B-to-C marketing is getting narrower. While business practices for complex industries and B-to-B services often require formulaic approaches coupled with a great deal of caution, more and more such companies are experimenting with marketing strategies that aren’t so “by the book.” Vendors like Newark/element 14, a Chicago-based electronic components distributor, take cues from Amazon when crafting their e-commerce sites to make them more user-friendly. Others, like Kinvey Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based backend as a service company for mobile app developers, experiment with creative content marketing, producing funny blogs to personalize their brands.
B-to-B marketers are right to simplify, to shake up the status quo and take cues from their B-to-C counterparts, experts say, because although there are distinctions between B-to-B and B-to-C offerings, there are no distinctions between buyers, when it comes down to it. “Every B-to-B customer is also a B-to-C consumer,” says Andy Hoar, senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. “They’re comparing their experiences. They’re looking at the B-to-B experience and wondering why, as a rule of thumb, it falls so far short of the B-to-C experience. [B-to-B] companies need to simplify, to re-think how they present things. They do it in a far too complex manner.”
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Cathy Hines wrote:
Good points, very helpful. It's often a challenge to convince B2B marketers that they can take on some of the B2C practices. I'm going to pass this along to my client.
Posted on : 2/25/2013