Business marketing: present and future

As it’s explain in this article the industrial or business marketing is the marketing of goods and services to industrial customers for use, in turn, in their own production of goods and services.This article highlight that business marketing problems must be handled differently that for consumer marketing because they have many differences such as: derived demand, multiple influences in thepurchasing decision, long purchase cycles, customer heterogeneity, and so on.

The main purpose of this paper is to emphasize the areas of progress in structuring industrial marketing problems andoutline prospects for important new developments in the short run. As Lilien accentuate, it’s necessary to apply different approaches to business marketing problems than the ones for consumer markets.To analyze marketing opportunities when consumers are other firms is important to have an understanding of organizations buying behavior, the article describe a set of factors that affect thebuying process and the different perspectives and severe literature that exists to explain the structure of the inter-organizational decision process.

Industrial markets are heterogeneous, customershave different requests, needs, incentives and constrains. There are multiple opinions about whether to perform or not market segmentation in the case of business marketing. But it is important to linkmarket segmentation to resource allocation.

In this paper the author structure the area of industrial product policy into several sub-areas: communications, pricing, product design, interactionsand competitive response.
According with the article industrial firms need a well conceived and professionally managed program to handle the high costs and high risks that accompanied thedevelopment of a new product, this kind of programs include effective management of new product research and explicit models for planning and forecasting new product sales.

The author concludes that the...