B2B Versus B2C Marketing

Consumer Buying Process

There are five main stages to the consumer buying process. These are need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior (The Consumer Factor, 2016). The first step, need recognition is the point at which the consumer begins the process, realizing that a purchase needs to be made. This is a good place to start the marketing process, as many companies do. The consumer will determine needs based on a rough hierarchy, starting with the things that they most need for survival, and moving up to items that are discretionary but important, to the items that are luxuries and the items that are discretionary and utterly frivolous. The typical consumer is bound by spending capacity, and therefore the most important items are the most likely to be purchased first.

A marketer can influence this stage in a couple of ways. First, the marketer can stimulate the demand. A common example of this tactic is to make the consumer feel that they are missing something. Breath mints or gum are good examples -- the marketer creates an advertisement or series of ads that promote the idea of fresh breath as being critical at all times. The consumer may become self-conscious about his or her breath. Thus, an ad on the side of a bus for gum might trigger an impulse purchase of gum from a consumer, the seed having been planted over years of repetition. The other way that a marketer can influence the consumer's need recognition is to bump their product up to the more important stages of the hierarchy. A good example of this would be diamonds. Diamonds are essentially useless items; they do nothing but sparkle. But, diamonds mining companies have for decades promoted the diamond not just for engagement rings but for other celebratory occasions. This stimulates demand. Diamonds may still mostly be a luxury item, but not when sealing an engagement - for most people at this point they become mandatory. Taking a discretionary luxury item and making it mandatory took time, but the diamond industry is based almost entirely on that premise.

Information search is the second stage. At this point, the consumer will investigate the different options that are available to fill the need that he or she has identified. At this stage of the process, products can be understood as low involvement or high involvement purchases. There are a number of different factors that determine whether something is low or high involvement. Brand loyalty, price, frequency of purchase (whether it is routine or not), product complexity and choice, and availability of information can all play a role. That pack of gum the person on the bus wanted is probably a low involvement purchase because it is cheap and a routine purchase. The person probably buys the same gum every time, and does this once a week. For the gum company, the key is to establish that purchase habit, and ensure that the product is available for the impulse purchase.

High involvement purchases tend to be more complex. Buying a home is probably the most high involvement purchase anybody will make, because of the money involvement, the lifestyle implications and the complexity of the purchase. Cars are also high involvement purchases for that reason. Other purchases are lower involvement, but still might involve some research. One of the ways a marketer can influence at this stage is to reduce the amount of thinking about a purchase that the customer has to do. Consider buying a smartphone. Any reasonable consumer would research this purchase, because most people spend a lot of time on their phones, and because phones can be quite expensive. Apple has done an excellent job of marketing because the company not only encourages strong brand loyalty, but also provides very few options. It sells tens of millions of iPhones to people who barely thought about it -- they decided right away that they wanted an iPhone, and then only had to make a couple of basic decisions. Buying an Android phone is a lot more complicated, because there are so many choices, both of manufacturers but price points and features and places to buy the phone. Many sell through telecommunications providers as a means of simplifying the decision somewhat, but Apple is still a simpler purchase. Alternately, vacations are similar. Cruise ships and all-inclusive resorts get a lot of business selling vacations to people who don't want to research all the world's vacation options and book everything themselves. That process is intensive, can take many hours and not everybody wants that level of involvement in their vacation planning.

The third step is the alternative evaluation. As noted above, Apple simplifies this process, basically rolling it into information search. You don't have too many choices so you don't have to do much research. In other cases, the consumer must determine a hierarchy of needs within the different alternatives. The consumer weighs price, product features and other attributes. For each person, the balance of the desired attributes will differ, and the role of the marketer is to convince the consumer that their product has the attributes the consumer seeks, either by convincing the consumer that the product has their desired attributes or alternately by convincing the consumer that the product's attributes are what the consumer desires.

A car buyer in particular is going to weigh a lot of things. The car buyer might weigh different consumer and professional reviews, their own experience with the car, the price, the dealer's reputation, the financing options, or something else. The marketer of the car needs to understand what is important to the consumer and try to push those buttons in order to make the sale, because the consumer likely has several reasonable alternatives from which to choose. For a low involvement purchase, alternative evaluation is a much quicker process. The gum buyer might already be brand loyal, and only need to choose between wintergreen and spearmint. For another alternative to win the purchase decision might require a creative flavor, or a contest, or a sale price.

The purchase decision is the stage that the marketer wants the consumer to reach. At this point, the consumer knows what he/she wants. The marketer can still influence this process, however, because the act of buying has to be possible. The gum company needs to be available everywhere, because if the gum buyer walks into the nearest store and does not see the brand he/she wants, the gum buyer will buy another brand. It's not worth going out of your way for gum, especially when you are paranoid about your breath. Apple makes it easy to buy their products -- not everybody has an Apple store nearby but it is easy to buy online. It's actually quite a bit harder to pin down a specific model of some other phone brands in the shop -- a consumer might intend to purchase a Samsung phone, not find the model they wanted to buy, and end up with another brand. At the car dealership, the deal could fall apart on financing, if the rate is bad and the consumer decides there is a better deal to be had elsewhere. Making the actual purchase easy has become an art form for Amazon -- things stay in your cart forever, and with one-click buying it only takes a momentary impulse to purchase something to make that happen.

The final step is the after-purchase behavior. The consumer's experience with the product needs to be positive, and any subsequent experience with the company as well. Apple wins brand loyalty in part because people like the product quality, and the service that comes with the product. Customer satisfaction is important, because it breeds loyalty. The gum company wins a weekly purchase if the customer likes the gum -- a marketer can shorten the stages of the consumer buying decision process if the consumer is happy with the product after the purchase. There are opportunities also to use service excellence to win over customers who might otherwise be dissatisfied. A customer who complains, and then is happy with how the company handled the complaint, is often a very loyal customer through subsequent purchase decisions (Ah & Loh, 2006).

The B2B Environment

The business-to-business environment is different from the business-to-consumer environment for marketers. One of the differences is that there is a lower level of emotional connection to the product. A consumer can be sold an emotional connection to a product during the consumer buying decision process. The need for a product can be emotional, or the drivers of the purchase decision can be. With business to business marketing, there is probably not going to be much connection between buyer and product. In most cases, the buyer is not the end user. Even when the buyer is an end user, the role of the product is almost entirely pragmatic -- the buyer is only authorized to make purchases that perform a specific business function. Thus, the buyer is only going to weigh practical considerations, so this is one of the more important differences between B2B and B2C marketing.

A second major difference between B2B and B2C is that the information gathering process can be significantly different. Business buyers may expend more energy even on relatively routine purchases because they are buying in volume. This can change the dynamic of how much involvement is in the purchase. A good example of this would be the computer market. A consumer might spend time gathering information, but might not. Most consumers do not do have specialized needs for their computers, and since they do not make a new computer purchase often they might have a fairly low level of price sensitivity. The business buyer, however, might have certain specialized requirements. Further, the business buyer might require such large volume that price sensitivity is very high. As a result, the information gathering and alternative evaluation stages of the process can be much more intense for the business buyer.

Yet, the high level of involvement also creates another difference -- B2B marketing involves more personal selling. A consumer can buy a computer online, or go into a store and spend just a few minutes with a sales representative. In B2B, with the dollar value at stake, computer makers are more inclined for forge relationships. Sales representatives are assigned to different customers, and they will form relationships with the business buyers as part of this process. That also allows the buyer better access to the information that they need to help make their decision.

A fourth difference is that B2B in many cases involves more bundling. Businesses that sell to other business often find it beneficial to sell multiple products and services to customers. This is because the selling is often as much about the customer as it is about the product. A company that sells to consumers often thinks in terms of product, because any given consumer might only buy one. Thus, the perspective is different. When HP sells a computer to a consumer, the selling is done on the basis of the computer's ability to meet the consumer's needs. But when HP sells to a business, it sells not only a volume of computers, but peripherals, hardware, software, and other services that go along with the computers. HP therefore thinks about business customers differently. It takes longer to establish a relationship with a business customer, and therefore in B2B there is impetus to leverage that relationship to its fullest. The benefit works both ways -- buyers find it convenient to work with the same vendor to solve multiple problems, and the vendor benefits by selling a wide variety of products and services to the same customer. All of this means that the relationship between buyer and seller is different. It lasts longer, is based on two-way flows of information, and needs to be mutually beneficial based on pragmatic considerations.

A fifth difference in marketing B2B versus B2C is that the channels for marketing are different. Reaching business buyers is not like reaching consumers. First, consumers are more distributed -- they are everywhere. Business customers might be concentrated; there are relatively few of them. To reach a consumer, HP might need to have broad distribution through third parties like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. They might need to advertise in newspapers or on television to reach a broad audience. The means of acquiring customers is different when marketing to businesses. There is more emphasis on personal selling, trade shows, and cold calling potential customers directly. Selling B2B is usually much more direct than selling B2C, which often relies on indirect marketing, using various media to convey messages to the consumer, and allowing the consumer to find your product. In B2B, the seller contacts the buyer, and the seller takes more responsibility for bringing the buyer to the purchase decision. A contract for HP can be worth tens of millions of dollars, and there might only be one or two people who ultimately make that decision -- reaching those people is worth a lot more effort, and building up repeat business is a lot more important to the seller as well.