Industrial Marketing and Consumer Marketing differences
At the most general level there is a body of theory, knowledge and practice that cuts across all marketing – industrial and consumer products and services business and non profits organization and so on.
But to understand and intelligently attack industrial marketing problems, a number of substantial differences between industrial and consumer marketing must be recognized.
While it may be true that these are often differences of degree rather than kind, the degrees of differences are substantial.
One of the marketing expert noted that the marketing concept, despite lip service from top management and all the organizational trappings of acceptability, often fell short of full scale acceptance in industrial companies because of a failure to recognize these differences.
He observed that the four key dimensions in applying the marketing concept to industrial marketing were:
1. Aiming for improved profit performance, with sales volume and market share per se not as important as in consumer marketing.
2. Indentifying customer needs, which requires understanding the economics of the customers’ operations, the structure of the industry within which they operate, and how they compete.
3. Selecting customer groups foe emphasis, the classics problem of market segmentation, which takes on special meaning to industrial markets of the high degree of buyer seller interdependence after the sale.
4. Designing the product. Service package, where there is seldom a standard product, the accompanying bundle of services is often more important than the product itself and the product must often be “invented.”
Industrial Marketing and Consumer Marketing differences
