Introduction
According to the American Marketing Association, "Marketing is an organizational function and set of a processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in a way that benefits the organization and its stakeholders" (2006). In other words, it is how a company determines what a customer's needs are and gears its products or services towards those needs in a way that their customers perceive value and the company makes money. Marketing can be broken down into two areas, between businesses and individual customers (B2C) and between businesses and businesses (B2B). When most people think of marketing, they picture consumer products being promoted through large advertising campaigns. While that area might be publicly perceived to be the largest area in marketing, the (B2B) market is actually much larger. According to researchers, "forecasters expect domestic B2B purchases will total several trillion a year" compared to "$269 billion expected [for] 2005" (American Marketing Association, 2006). The following paper will look at some of the differences between marketing on a B2B and a B2C website.
Marketing Strategy
When a company is creating its strategy for marketing, they "must consider both the nature of their products and the nature of their potential customers" (Schneider, 2004, p. 156). What a company is trying to sell or who they are trying to sell it to will help to determine how they market their product or service. A B2C site aims to sell its product or service to an individual end user, so they "organize their websites from an internal viewpoint, that is, according to the way that they arranged their product design and manufacturing processes" (Schneider, 2004, p. 158), which i ...