Business-to-Business Marketing

• Business-to-Business Marketing

Business-to-Business Marketing Elective Courses

Overview

The demise of the « integrated enterprise » explains a large part of the explosion of interorganizational exchange. So much so that the overall value of the much (overly?) publicized B2C exchange now represents less than the sum of B2B trade... However, it is fair to say that business marketing too often remains the underdog in terms of career perspectives for MBA marketing graduates… The objective of this course is then to give students an understanding of the key specificities of Business Marketing, and to encourage them to think about potential careers in this wide-open field. Simply put, Business Marketing may well offer some of the most exciting jobs upon graduation.

This relatively short course does not purport to cover all the various aspects of B2B marketing, however. Rather, it is limited to seven topics that I believe are key to understand B2B specificities. Students are therefore expected to buy, read and assimilate the companion textbook to the course if they want to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of B2B marketing.

The whole course pivots on the key concept of “value”, which is of paramount importance in business marketing; it will successively cover the issues of understanding, creating, delivering and appropriating value. The whole course pivots on the key concept of “value”; it will successively cover the issues of understanding, creating, delivering and appropriating value.

The course uses an innovative block-buster movie-based approach, mixed with more traditional pedagogical tools (lectures, case studies…)

Learning outcomes

Knowledge of How to . . .

• Understand organizational buying decisions, recognizing that rational behavior is only a first-order approximation
• Define value in a more rigorous way, conceptually distinct from the price paid
• Focus on strategies increasing the “customer incentive to purchase”
• Quantify value as much as possible, sometimes using “word equations”
• Bridge the “value gap”, systematically investigating issues of intangibility, variability and visibility
• Distinguish “true” solutions from empty marketing claims
• Evaluate the “relational potential” at the level of the product family, and developing appropriate marketing tools that match both the potential and the actual purchasing policy
• Manage portfolio of customer types to meet different objectives