The purpose of this paper is to discuss business-to-business marketing requires a special, unique set of marketing

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The purpose of this paper is to discuss business-to-business marketing requires a special, unique set of marketing concepts and principles versus business-to-business marketing is really not that different and the basic marketing concepts and principles apply. The basic concepts and principles for business-to-consumer have been studied and the researcher agreed that the basic marketing and principles do apply. However, the application and implementation of the marketing strategy may need to be attuned to the nature of business-to-business activity.

Business-to-business (B2B) can be explained as business that sells products or provides services to other businesses. These organisations in turn, may re-sell the products and services to final consumers; or they may use the products or services as an input for manufacturing of final consumer goods; or use it provide services to final consumers; or government that use these products and services to serve the society. While B2B activity may exist in both traditional form and online, the acronym B2B is commonly refer to the online variety (Jobber, 2007, p. 19).

Whereas Business-to-Consumer (B2C) is defined as business that sells products or provide services to final consumers. These consumers can be either individuals or family units and these products or services is purchased for own consumption purposes. Although B2C activity may exist in both traditional form and online, the acronym B2C is generally refer to the online variety (McDaniel, et al., 2006, p. 196).

Modern marketing concept can be defined as identifying and meeting targeted consumer needs and wants better than the competitor, for the benefit of the organisation and its stakeholders. Therefore, the function of marketing management will include formulating and implementing a suitable marketing strategy to achieve organisation goals; through satisfied customers (Kotler & Keller, 2009, p. 45).

To understand the marketing function, marketer needs to understand the core marketing concepts: the production concepts, the product concepts, the selling concepts, the marketing concepts, holistic concepts and societal marketing concepts.

It was found that organisations in USA, Argentina and New Zealand still uses the traditional four marketing mix as a general guide in their marketing practices. Although the new modern marketing concepts are included in their effort to reach out to targeted customers. Some countries may uses transaction marketing, or some may opt for network marketing. It shows that basic marketing concepts are applicable to both B2B and B2C (Pels, et al., 2004).

In order to the understanding of business market, the marketer should be concerned about the buying process of the organisation. The organisational buying process has a few stages more than of consumer buying process. There are eight stages involved, please see figure 4 below.

Understanding the difference between business market and consumer market is necessary. Lilien (1987) argued that B2B market is distinctive due to several reasons. The business market generally has few and larger buyers, i.e. the purchase quantity will be large. And the buyer is unable to take any risk of errors, because it may be part of the organisation’s cost saving strategy. The difference between consumer and business marketing were also documented by Simkin (2000). Simkin believed that business market is conventionally involves the business market structure and market demand; the nature of the buying unit within the organisation; and the type of decisions and the decision process involved (Kotler et al., 2001). Hakansson (et al., 1976) also characterise B2B companies as containing a lot of customers and require to be handled individually.