Marketing

The term "marketing" usually conjures images of consumer packaged goods and advertising campaigns, but, as the millennial decade winds down, business-to-business (B2B) marketing actually dwarfs the consumer side of the business. Forecasters expect domestic B2B purchases will continue to total trillions of dollars annually. For example, the available data comparing B2B and B2C e-commerce have estimated that domestic B2B online sales totaled $2.7 trillion in 2004, compared to just $184 billion for online retail sales. By any measure, estimates on B2B commerce dwarf what U.S. consumers buy in a typical year.

More important than B2B marketing's relative size, however, is its role as a complex discipline integral to selling products or services to business, industrial, institutional, and government buyers. In past decades, innovative products, great engineering, or great salesmanship alone might have been enough to close a business sale. But today's shorter product lifecycles and the intense pressures of global competition no longer allow companies the luxury of "build it and they will come" thinking.

Just what is business marketing anyway? Because the answer forms the core of our mission at the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM), we've spent considerable time discussing it with the leading marketers who comprise our membership. Through these discussions it became clear that the foundation of the B2B marketing discipline is to both understand the concept of value--in tangible, numeric terms--and implementing a systemic process for managing value. We worked with our members and key thought leaders to define a framework for the B2B marketing process at the highest level. This "Value Delivery Framework," shown in Exhibit 1, lists the categories of processes that define business marketing management.