Literature Review

According to Sandhusen and Richard (2008), Business-to-business (B2B)

describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between
amanufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer in marketing
perspective.B2B branding is a term used in marketing. The overall volume of B2B
transactions is much higher than the volume of B2C transactions. The primary
reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B transactions
involving sub components or raw materials, and only one B2C transaction,
specifically sale of the finished product to the end customer. The final transaction, a
finished vehicle sold to the consumer, is a single (B2C) transaction. B2B is also used
in the context of communication and collaboration. Many businesses are now using
social media to connect with their consumers (B2C), however, they are now using
similar tools within the business so employees can connect with one another. When
communication is taking place amongst employees, this can be referred to as "B2B"
communication. (Sandhusen Richard, 2008).
According to Joel York, the todays trend business buyers are awash in a
deluge of online information. B2B buyer behavior has evolved in adaptation to the
Internet. A new species of B2B buyer has arisen that is more connected, more
impatient, more elusive, more impulsive, and more informed than its pre-millennium
ancestors. The Internet has changed the B2B buying process so radically that its
difficult to recollect exactly how the pre-Internet B2B buyer used to go about the
business of making a purchase: paper, phone and people mostly. The process went
something like this: ask the analysts about the next big thing, collect requirements
into and RFP, get a list of vendors from a roundup in an industry magazine, go to a
trade show and collect collateral, solicit and evaluate RFP responses by mail or fax,
call in a short list of vendors to do a dog and pony show, follow up with a technical
drill down meeting, maybe do a bake-off or a pilot, select a vendor, call a reference
account, negotiate final pricing and contract terms, and wrap it all up by planning out
phase 2 of the project: a complex and expensive implementation. It was a slow,
arduous and expensive process for which consultants charged exorbitant fees that
B2B buyers were happy to pay, because it wasnt easy.
With such a treasure trove of information available online, the Internet is the
21st century B2B buyers first stop for researching products and services. It wont be
the only source of information for the savvy prospect, but the Internet now is a
significant and recurring influence throughout the B2B buying process. The new
species of B2B buyer is connected to the Internet physically, functionally, socially
and frequently.
Moreover, the B2B buying process neither starts nor stops at your website. It
is more likely to start at a major search engine, industry portal or social network. If
you want your product or service to be considered, its critical that your content
appear wherever the new B2B buyer goes online at every point in the decision
making process. It isnt enough to just write a blog or make a white paper available
for download on your website, because your prospects may never find your website
if you dont show up in search and social media.
In the pre-millennium B2B buying process, the salesperson was the
gatekeeper of information. That meant that the pre-millennium B2B buyer had to
engage with the salesperson early on and stay engaged throughout every stage of
the B2B buying process. A prospect might go dark or a sale might be lost, but a
purchase could not move forward without engaging with the salesperson. Not so
today. Unfortunately for the B2B salesperson, the new B2B buying process tips the
information imbalance in the prospects favor. The new breed of B2B buyer can find
your product or service, learn about it, evaluate it, see what others think about it, and
in many cases try it and buy it, all without engaging with a salesperson.
The new breed of B2B buyer is more agile than its pre-millennium ancestor.
Cheap and easy access to online information about products and services enables
flexibility in the new B2B buying process the same way the elimination of setup costs
enable flexibility in manufacturing. When the up-front cost of purchase-related
information was high, the pre-millennium B2B buyer was forced to orchestrate a
rigid, deterministic B2B buying process that ensured the investment required to
execute the process itself was not wasted and produced a positive result, i.e., a
considered purchase with high ROI. Purchase decisions were made up frontonly
the vendor was unknown, budgets were established before the buying process
began, requirements were collected and communicated, vendors were evaluated in
tandem, and a clean vendor selection was made.
The new breed of B2B buyer does not face this constraint. Today, window
shopping is cheap. In the case of most SaaS and cloud applications, the entire B2B
buying process is cheap: trial is free and purchase amounts to a monthly
subscription that can be canceled at any time. Instead of orchestrating a structured
B2B buying process with a certain outcome, the new B2B buyer can start, stop, start
again, turn around, go slow, go fast, whatever. The new B2B buying process carries
no internal momentum. Purchases are motivated by near term organizational
priorities and the relative urgency to solve a pressing business problem, which can
turn on a dime.
Online marketers lament the waning effectiveness of email. Some even claim
that email marketing is dead and spam killed it. Email may be waning for marketing
communications, but it is central to the internal communications of the new impulsive
B2B buyer and acts as a powerful catalyst in the new B2B buying process. The new
impulsive B2B buyer can research your product online, coordinate an email
conversation among all decision makers, get a basic consensus without a single
meeting, and then stop dead because something else came up. Then, six months
later the VP of Such-and-Such decides: This needs to get done yesterday! And
shoots off an email that reignites the urgency around the purchase. Next thing you
know, a previously dead or unknown deal is suddenly very hot, and a purchase is
made almost on first contact. Or, at least first contact to the unprepared who are not
measuring, modeling and moving the new B2B buying process throughout its
lifecycle. (Joel York, 2013).
According to finding from Ann Handley and Joe Pulizzi last years survey
showed, nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their
businesses, and on average, marketers use eight content marketing tactics to
achieve their marketing goals. The most popular tactics are article posting (79%),
social media (excluding blogs) (74%), blogs (65%), eNewsletters (63%), case
studies (58%), and in-person events (56%). While marketers are confident about the
value of content marketing, they are challenged to demonstrate the effectiveness
and impact of individual tactics and distribution channels. That said, the confidence
gap we discovered last year is shrinking when it comes to the rates of adoption of
specific content marketing tactics and the perceived effectiveness of those tactics.
Content marketing uptake is high across industries, with no single industry reporting
below 70% adoption. The professional services industry reports the highest level of
adoption, just nudging out computing/software, which ranked number one last year.
Companies still struggle to integrate digital tactics deep into broader
marketing campaigns, but there are a few key points of leverage (such as pushing to
mandate an objective Channel Consideration Review early in the process) that can
help weed out reflexive channel bias, opening the door for digital influence.
Armed with past performance data and evidence from external best
practices, a growing number of marketers are pushing to develop standardized
campaign architectures, which offer a strong platform for promoting the best
applications and integration points for digital tactics.
Increased digital marketing efforts demand continuous and collective
management, something few companies are designed to support. The value
destroyed by this misfit approachalthough hard to quantifyis potentially very
large. Several companies are taking steps to restructure as a result. Review your
campaign planning process and look for opportunities to apply the practices outlined
on in particular, seek ways to hardwire a consideration of digital tactics earlier in the
planning process. Evaluate several campaigns with similar objectives and identify a
reasonable opportunity to develop a standard architecture for your teams to align to.
As noted be sure to look not only inside your own organizations past campaigns and
performance data, but seek out industry and outside of industry campaigns as a
reference for new ideas and best practices.
Take a few hours to exhaustively sketch out the various activities shaping
your digital footprint and compare that back to the organizational structure and
processes accountable for managing those activities. Then identify all of the specific
areas where you could be potentially leaking or losing potential value by not
executing in a more coordinated way. Chances are there are several low-hanging
fruits for improving integration (e.g., a more frequent or intense coordinating
mechanism between SEO and social media) as well as some larger battles (e.g.,
relocating paid search from the media team to an integration search performance
team). Consider tackling a small one and pushing a large one this year.
As the trend emerging, the need of the advertising and branding increases
parallel. The advertising become a must in the internet perspective. This because it
give the advantages to them in branding their product and services. Potential
customers are readily turning to their personal networks and publicly available
informationincreasingly via digital and social media channelsto self-diagnose
their problems and form opinions about solutions. To understand the scope of this
issue in the B2B context, CEBs Marketing Leadership Council (MLC) surveyed more
than 1,500 customer contacts (decision makers and influencers in a recent major
business purchase) for 22 large B2B organizations (spanning all major NAICS
categories and 10 industries). In a striking finding, the survey revealed that the
average customer had completed more than one-half of the purchase decision-
making process prior to engaging a supplier sales rep directly (Figure 1). At the
upper limit, that number ran as high as 70% (Figure 2). The fundamental implication
is clear: companies that fail to show up strong in this context are underserving
potential customers and at risk of losing mindshare and, ultimately, sales
opportunities.










References
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Aaker D. A. (1997), Should You Take Your Brand to Where the Action Is? Harvard
Business Review , Sept-Oct 1997.
Abimbola, T. (2005) Branding as a Competitive strategy for Demand Management
in SMEs, Journal of Research in Marketing and Entrepreneurship , Vol 3 Issue 2, pp
97-106
Garbade, Michael (2011). Differences in Venture Capital Financing of U.S., UK,
German and French Information Technology Start-ups A Comparative Empirical
Research of the Investment Process on the Venture Capital Firm Level. Mnchen:
GRIN Verlag GmbH. p. 31. ISBN 3-640-89316-6.
Sandhusen, Richard (2008). Marketing. Hauppauge, N.Y: Barron's Educational
Series. p. 520. ISBN 0-7641-3932-0.
Shelly, Gary (2011). Systems analysis and design. Boston, MA: Course Technology,
Cengage Learning. p. 10. ISBN 0-538-47443-2.