Welcome to segment, What is B2B Marketing Part 1. This is the agenda. We'll talk about the various facets of B2B marketing, including the concept of the buying center, the selling center of the need for total marketing and how companies buy, in their procedure. So let’s get started. Okay what is B2B marketing? It stands for Business to Business Marketing. And here, I show you a very, what looks like a complex network of relationships, and that gets at the core of what B2B marketing is like. And I wanted to emphasize the complexity of B2B marketing. I think the misperception about B2B marketing is that it's rather simple especially when compared to the B2C marketing. But as we can see here, business to businesses form this very complex relationships that can be based on just one department and so the numbers here signify departments whether it's for a seller or for a buyer. And you'll note that they're exactly the same. So I kind of again stacked the deck to make the argument that essentially our buyers are a reflection of us. So to the extent that we have all these departments and know how they think, that's something that we can just serve benchmark, when we think about how can we deal with their marketing department, their engineering department, their production department and so on. So the key takeaway here is that we're marketing to other businesses, businesses that are like us. Okay, so I mentioned the buying center and for goal the buying center because it's sort of the center where you have these different departments come and make decisions about a purchase, and even though I've indicated their roles here, normally, you can't identify them by roles or rather by positions or by departments. And the fact that you have different departments, implies that they might have different purchase criteria. And because you have potentially different positions involved, some being vice-presidents, other thing, maybe, lower ranked managers. The weight that they carry then the decisions made there. Okay, one of the interesting roles that you saw on the list of buying center members was Gatekeepers. And gatekeepers don't mean physical gatekeepers, but it's much more in a, for the conceptual sense of people who control the inflow of decisions, the inflow of information, the inflow of, in some cases, people. And so even though their positions may be sort of low, their actual power may be much bigger. And here in Asia because we still have a hierarchical concept stemming from our culture, such as Confucianism, sometimes it's hard to infer who the real decision maker may be, and he is or she is behind the scenes. And that's why gatekeepers may be sort of the frontmen or women of the real powered decision-makers. So that's something that you should always keep in mind, that behind the scenes you may have someone who's much younger, someone who may be of a female gender. That may sort of have power stemming from maybe their blood ties, that even though they're behind the scenes, they are the ones that you really ultimately want to influence. Okay, so what does this all mean? Well the big implication of course is that to the extent that you have a buying center, you too should form a center. It's like sports and if your opposing team has five people, let's say in basketball, and you're the only person playing. Well then you're overmatched, not only in terms of just numbers, but also in terms of expertise, and that is why you too need backup help to the extent that finance information is needed. You need backup help from your finance department to the extent that engineering information is needed, you need backup help from your engineering department. So let's look at this example, there is this growing industry called electronic controlled units, and these are electronically embedded systems within a car that aid the functionality of a car. And these are some of the big players, companies like Bosch and Continental. And the Asia Pacific is becoming a big market, because consumers here want functionality in many of their cars. And Europe is also a source of regulation that mandate conformance by auto companies, such as in ECUs for safety, and it's not just safety that‘s impacted by the ECUs but it's also in the case of electric cars, the power train. It could be related to how eco-friendly a car is. It could be the entertainment system that you have and the navigational systems that you have as well. So in short, cars are becoming much more electronic. And that is why vendors of ECUs have to integrate their ECUs, not only with the hardware, but because, in some cases some cars have over 100 ECU's in the car, consolidation is becoming a big, big issue. And that's why you need horizontal integration across ECUs. And that's where a salesperson who has perhaps much more of a sales orientation and less of an engineering one, and even if he does have some engineering background, it may be just based on maybe one of the ECU's. So that's where trying to market, trying to sell in the ECU alone, may be very, very difficult for just one sales team, and that's where you need much moreof a selling center approach.
