Business-to-Business Marketing & Supply Chain

Introduction

This essay aims to talk about business-to-business marketing and supply chain. The motive here is to analyze and discuss the case of a Swedish Advertising Agency, ADEXP, and one of its clients Garden Inc. Since, B2B (business-to-business) refers to commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a wholesaler and a manufacturer, so the volume of these transactions is relatively higher than B2C transactions. One of the major reasons for this is that a typical supply chain includes many B2B transactions in between the manufacturer and the providers of raw materials, or sub-components. On the other hand, this supply chain involves only one B2C transaction, which is the sale of the finished goods and products to the end users. For the same reason, the need for business marketing in business-to-business transactions is crucial. Other names for business marketing include industrial marketing, or B2B marketing.

Moreover, commercial business and organizations also need to facilitate the sale of their products and services to other organizations who are their clients. In addition to this, there is also a crucial need for business marketers to create professional credibility of their work. Thus, this essay highlights that if B2B relations between advertising agencies and their clients are generally based on everyday interactions and conversations, then what is the case for more traditional professions like doctors, lawyers, and accountants? The essay also provides discussions related to the planning and managing 'moments of truth' in service marketing. On the other hand, the essay also aims to highlight other clues or themes in order to create a sense of trust and professional credibility, other than those used by ADEXP.

Discussion

The practice of organizations or individuals to facilitate the sale of their goods, products, or services to other organizations or companies that in turn use those products as components in their manufacturing processes, resell them, or use them to support their operations, is referred as 'business marketing'. The process is also known as business-to-business (B2B) marketing, or industrial marketing. Marketing is all about creating, understanding, and managing exchange relationships between all the economic parties including service providers, manufacturers, final consumers, and numerous channel members.

In business-to-business markets, organizing economic exchange is mainly done with the help of maintaining long-term relationships between buyers and sellers. Moreover, in this case, professional and manufactured products or other business services are the primary objects of exchange. These exchanges occur only within an established relationship of buyers and sellers, rather than considering new partners every time when the need for exchange arises. Thus, in this scenario, the most important issue is about trust and credit worthiness. There are two types of business relationships in the market. Direct relationship that is in business to business market, and indirect relationship that is business to the consumer market. The direct business to business relationship is customized and personal. It is far more personalized than the customer market (Barry, 2011, pp.628 - 642).

Two companies might engage themselves working hand in gloves to fulfill the need of final ...