Posted by Christine Birkner (staff writer for Marketing News), A Simple Plan
From the American Marketing Association 

Summary

The gulf between B-to-B marketing and B-to-C marketing is getting narrower. While business practices for complex industries and B-to-B services often require formulaic approaches coupled with a great deal of caution, more and more such companies are experimenting with marketing strategies that aren’t so “by the book.” Vendors like Newark/element 14, a Chicago-based electronic components distributor, take cues from Amazon when crafting their e-commerce sites to make them more user-friendly. Others, like Kinvey Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based backend as a service company for mobile app developers, experiment with creative content marketing, producing funny blogs to personalize their brands.

B-to-B marketers are right to simplify, to shake up the status quo and take cues from their B-to-C counterparts, experts say, because although there are distinctions between B-to-B and B-to-C offerings, there are no distinctions between buyers, when it comes down to it. “Every B-to-B customer is also a B-to-C consumer,” says Andy Hoar, senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. “They’re comparing their experiences. They’re looking at the B-to-B experience and wondering why, as a rule of thumb, it falls so far short of the B-to-C experience. [B-to-B] companies need to simplify, to re-think how they present things. They do it in a far too complex manner.”