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Marketing Excellence: ACCENTURE
1) How does Accenture target to its B-to-B audience so effectively?
2) Evaluate Accenture’s history of branding campaigns. What remains consistent
throughout?
Marketing Excellence: GE
1) Discuss GE’s B-to-B marketing strategy. Why has the company been so successful over
the years at targeting such a large business audience?
2) Have “Ecomagination,” and “Healthymagination” successfully communicated GE’s focus
on its newer endeavors? Why or why not?
END-OF-CHAPTER SUPPORT
MARKETING DEBATE—How Different Is Business-to-Business Marketing?
Some business-to-business marketing executives lament the challenges of business-to-business
marketing, maintaining that many traditional marketing concepts and principles do not apply and
that selling products and services to a company is fundamentally different from selling to
individuals. Others disagree, claiming that marketing theory is still valid and only involves some
adaptation in the marketing tactics.
Take a position: Business-to-business marketing requires a special, unique set of marketing
concepts and principles versus business-to-business marketing is really not that different and the
basic marketing concepts and principles apply.
Pro: Business-to business marketing requires a unique set of marketing concepts and principles
versus consumer marketing. The special set of concepts and skills needed in business-to-business
marketing include professional salespeople; products that meet specific and sometimes specially
engineered needs of a set of a few customers; marketing promotional aspects that deemphasize
price in exchange for services; delivery terms; special financing arrangements; and other
traditional “non-marketing” considerations.
Finally, the other major difference between consumer and business-to-business marketing usually
involves the amount of people involved in the sale: from both the sellers firm and the purchasing
firm. In consumer selling, the user is generally the purchaser. In the business-to-business,
marketing both the selling firm and the buying firm includes members of other disciplines
(engineering, transportation, warehousing, finance, and others) from the beginning of the process
to the time of actual purchase. The addition of these people fosters strong ties between the two
firms but also lengthens the time and complexity of the sale.
Con: Business-to-business marketing does not really differ from the consumer market in one’s
approach. The major differences between the two is not in “delivering value to the consumer”
but in the implementation and time phase. Buyers still buy to “solve problems” and
business-to-business marketing and consumer marketing still has to solve the buyers’ problems.
Time and attention to detail may be extended for business-to-business marketers but the accepted
marketing principles of price, place, promotion, and product still apply; it is just their
implementation and application(s) that differ.
MARKETING DISCUSSION: Applying B-to-C Concepts to B-to-B
Consider some of the consumer behavior topics for business-to-consumer (B-to-C) marketing
from Chapter 6. How might you apply them to business-to-business (B-to-B) settings? For
example, how might noncompensatory models of choice work? Mental accounting?
Suggested Response:
From Chapter 6 we have learned that consumer behavior is influenced by cultural factors, social
factors, and personal factors. These are individual considerations that apply to the
business-to-business market as well as to the consumer market. The difference is that all of the
