Selling to a company works almost nothing like selling to you
Buy a sofa and you likely pay the sticker price, decide alone and take it home. A business buying office chairs haggles, runs the order past accounting, quality control and logistics, may lease rather than own, and quite often picks the supplier who already buys its printer ink. Marketing has to handle both worlds.
At its simplest, marketing means winning customers, keeping them satisfied and holding on to them. The American Marketing Association revisits its official definition every three years, and the changes tell a story. Its 1935 version spoke of business activity that moves goods and services along from makers to buyers. By 2008 it described creating and exchanging offerings of value for customers, partners and society at large, with that last group newly added.
Philip Kotler, one of the field's most prolific writers, shifted in the same direction. In 1980 he framed marketing as meeting needs and wants through exchange; by 2018 he stressed engaging customers and building lasting relationships. The underlying idea that a firm should anticipate what buyers want better than rivals do is often traced to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, though it only caught on nearly two centuries later. Once seen as a creative trade, marketing now borrows so heavily from psychology, sociology, economics, mathematics and neuroscience that many treat it as a science.
Marketers distinguish needs, which people cannot go without, from wants, which culture and peers shape, and demands, which are wants backed by money. Grouping customers by the benefits they seek is hard in practice yet ranks among the most effective ways to divide a market.
The contrast between business and consumer selling runs deep. A company's demand is derived, rising and falling with how much its own customers want. Firms buy in bulk, there are far fewer of them, and they cluster geographically. Personal selling dominates business deals, while consumer marketing leans on advertising, promotions, public relations and social media, often pitched at emotion. Business buyers range from producers, such as a toymaker buying plastic, to resellers, government agencies and institutions like schools. Newer models flip the arrangement: consumers sell to businesses, or trade with one another through online platforms.
Source: Marketing
