Content Outline
Related Assignments
Once you have figured out your product and market segments, now you must find a way to get your venture in front of customers. This section goes over the difference between B2B and B2C marketing, how to develop customer personas, how to create a brand identity, and how to make marketing campaigns and assets to help raise brand awareness.
For all startup marketing, you need to identify who your customer is and why they need to hear your message. However, the ways you do that vary drastically based on whether you're selling directly to consumers, or to businesses & other institutions.
B2B (Business to Business) companies market their products directly to other businesses, governments, or institutions, while B2C (Business to Consumer) companies market their products directly to consumers.
Some companies that are mostly B2B still do heavy B2C marketing, like Slack and Mailchimp. It's important that these tools occupy space in our mind, so that if we do have a business case for those products, those brands jump out immediately. For example, Notion.so recently made their product free for all individuals - saying in their press announcement that they make most of their money from enterprise sales.
However, it's unlikely you have ever heard of McKesson - even though they are number 7 on the Fortune 500 list. Why? Because they are a drug distributor, and unless you're about to Walter White us, it's unlikely you have any business fretting over drug distribution businesses. They don't need to be at the forefront of your mind.
User Attraction, Marketing, and Sales, Citation 1
The purpose of marketing is to create awareness of your products and services, awareness which hopefully leads to a sale. But before we start talking about marketing, it's worthwhile to examine the process by which buying decisions are made, aptly known as The Buying Process.
The buying process cycle
Your job is to guide consumers along this buying process so that they end up with your products and services at the end of it. But the process for doing so varies drastically for different types of products, because the time horizon for the buying process varies widely based on what you are buying.
For example, let's say you were at the mall and you noticed a shirt you liked. You might do a needs recognition and think "I could use another dress shirt." You'll look at the price, constituting your information search, and then if you are a really savvy shopper, you might tell yourself that if you don't find a better shirt during your trip, you'll come back and buy this one. But that's unlikely, because for smaller products, the evaluation of alternatives is usually light, because the opportunity cost of getting it wrong is low. You make the purchase decision, you check out, and when you wear the shirt, hopefully you reflect positively during your post-purchase behavior.
For many consumer products, the buying process is quick and emotional. Let's contrast that to a business purchase. When a business is purchasing something, there are likely to be many more people involved in the buying process. The stakes are higher, because businesses (hopefully) watch their purchases carefully, and often much more money is at stake (shirts for 10,000 people instead of 1). More people need to be convinced to get on board, and customers do a much deeper information search and evaluation of alternatives. The business buying process is slow and rational.
This fact effects how products are marketed and sold between the two categories. Let's dive into each.
Consumers have extremely short attention spans, are inundated with information, and often make purchasing decisions that are driven by emotion and made relatively quickly.