How Are Buying Decisions by a Company Different from Buying Decisions by Individual Consumers or Households?

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2) How can Pivot Marketing effectively market itself to its business customers?

Firstly, carry out strategic planning. Define its vision, mission and business. Know who their scope are and target market. Analyse its own core competencies, their skills, technologies and resources that distinguish it from its competitors.

Then, carry out proper business planning which includes SWOT analysis, Product Market Decisions and Functional Strategies. The SWOT Analysis of Pivot Marketing is show in table below.

Location of Factor

Type of Factor

Favourable

Unfavourable

Internal

Strengths*

Well known for its brand in their target markets (Events).

Diversified clientele inclusive of multinational companies giving it credibility.

Weaknesses

Only recognised in China, mainly Shanghai.

External

Opportunities

Many developed and developing countries worldwide could be tapped to expand its business.

Threats*

Competition with other the events management companies.

Using the Ansoff Framework, Pivot Marketing might want to increase its market penetration by, offering better promotions to its regular clients. Conversely, it may also want to sell their services at a premium to its clients who are willing to pay more due to its increasing reputation in the events management industry. Pivot Marketing may want to look into Loyalty programmes that can attract returning and regular clients. Pivot Marketing might also look into Product Development. It may want to offer revolutionary and unique designs that differ from their competitors and would provide them an edge over them. It may want to expand into new markets through Market Development and Diversification. It could explore the opportunities worldwide to expand its business. It should not just focus its business in China alone. The international market has huge potential. It may want to select its’ new target market. Lastly, it may want to look into Diversification through selling data to newer event management companies based on its’ client’s history of wants and needs. It may also want to provide consulting advice for newer firms.

Develop a marketing program: Marketing Mix + Budget

- Price strategy: Lower costs than competitors

- Product strategy: Offer products in demand at an affordable price

- Promotion strategy: Feature demonstrations of the product across Asia to introduce and market the features and highlight of the product

- Place strategy: Search out, utilize and train distributors to attract consumers.

This requires time and money, hence the budget must be approved by the top management.

Lastly, Monitor and Control the Results through the use of concurrent Variance analysis and corrective actions. Use of the marketing dashboards to focus on the critical indicators, thresholds and to provide a source for continuous easy monitoring of performance.

How will its strategies and marketing activities be different from a company marketing products and services to households and individuals?

Pivot Marketing is Business to Business (B2B) while a Company marketing to household and individuals is (B2C).

Size of market: Since market size of Pivot Marketing is small and niche, they will need to carefully target their customers based on their niche and craft marketing messages that cater specifically to their niche. Whereas for households, since they target so many people, they will need to craft marketing messages that can cater to a broad spectrum of people.

Buyer Behaviour: Since B2B is more task-oriented, marketing messages and approach need to be focused on how Pivot Marketing can solve their customer’s problem or meet their needs. Whereas for B2C, purchase decisions can be emotional and will require marketing messages to invoke more communications strategy to gain their trust and attention.

Buyer-Customer Relationship: In B2C, consumer marketing is targeted at large groups of people through mass media and retailers. The relationship here is not that meaningful. In B2B, it is more personal and real. Sales representatives and marketers will usually target the influencers and decision makers in the consumer organisations in B2B. Significant amount of time is spent to build trust and loyalty between the supplier and consumer before business is carried out.

Modes of Communication: Business marketing entails more direct channels of distribution to consumers. They commit a smaller part of their promotional budget to general advertising, usually through direct marketing efforts and trade publications as opposed to B2C markets where a larger portion of their budget is spent on general advertisement to capture a larger market.

Greater Expertise: In B2B, generally the consumers are more knowledgeable since they consists or engineers, technicians etc. Hence the marketing strategies would need to include communication in specific terms to suit the demand of the consumer. In B2C, the marketing strategy would be to attract consumers through gimmicks and discounts, lesser emphasis on the technical aspects of the product or service.