Many of the projects I’ve worked on have been in areas such as financial services, office supplies, telecommunications, IT, automotive and business air travel. In these markets, business individuals are important both as business and consumer decision makers. My definition of business individuals is business buying decision makers whose personal attributes and behaviour as individual consumers need to be understood by suppliers. This may extend to the details of their buying behaviour.
My listing was of markets where business individuals’ roles as consumers shade into their roles as business people. This fuzziness occurs for many reasons. In small businesses, it exists because business individuals do not distinguish neatly between their business and personal life. Their telephone, their car, their computer, their office supplies, indeed their money, are used for both purposes, however much the taxman tries to achieve a neat separation.
In larger businesses, some of this fuzziness may also exist, but the connection through brand and reputation is often an additional factor. For example, a business individual’s experience of flying with an airline on business may influence his or her choice of carrier to use for family holidays particularly if the latter are partly paid for with Air Miles.
Spot the difference
Business individuals are different from buyers that are purely consumers or corporate buyers. The latter only need to be understood from the corporate perspective their roles, business buying behaviour and budgets. However, even here, few professional suppliers to such decision makers would argue that their age, personal interests and family structure are unimportant.
You can see where this is heading. For companies involved in both business and consumer markets, gone are the days when they could neatly separate the two. That is why big data providers can now supply clients with lists of home addresses of directors in businesses. But what should you do when you know who’s who?
The fuzziness between the two categories of decision maker has increased for various reasons. One is that working from home is now more common among larger businesses even if for only one or two days a week. Sometimes (sadly) it’s because work has to be taken home so often my stepson works in IT as a full-time employee, yet brings work home as he provides near round-the-clock support for offices in Australia, the UK and US. Not surprisingly, we’ve opted for the fastest broadband we can get, irrespective of price.
Another reason for the fuzziness is that the Web has changed how many business individuals buy in both their worlds. Decades ago, the business individual bought mainly from a sales person, while the consumer individual bought from a shop, dealer or agent. Now, both buy increasing amounts from the Internet, and it has enabled many business suppliers to reach consumer and small businesses cost-effectively particularly in areas such as PCs, mobile telephones and financial services.
Unidentified targets
Because of the ease of identifying individuals and households, and the importance for the Internet of secure identification, its effect has been extremely positive in terms of its benefit for consumers.
Where corporate buyers are concerned, most of their Internet and email relationships with suppliers and customers are likely to be based on well-structured relationships. However, corporate buyers as business individuals are generally more difficult to identify, so it is harder to validate them and allow them to buy as new customers (though corporate credit cards have helped here). The obvious answer to this problem is to allow business individuals to input data about themselves that validates them securely and that allows the supplier to link them to third party business and consumer databases where these exist.
However, most companies who could do this, actually choose not to. The reason seems to be that few companies have decided which aspects of their marketing (particularly their products, brand, marketing communications and customer service) should be modified to take into account the differences between business individuals as decision makers on the one hand and corporate and consumer decision makers on the other. If the marketing push is not there, then the data development won’t be undertaken, while if the data does not distinguish between these different categories of buyers, the opportunity for the supplier won’t be clear. So we have the perfect vicious circle.
Stepping out of the shadows
Fortunately, the much stronger emphasis that many companies are starting to place on B2B direct marketing is taking them into the areas discussed above, so they are being forced to address this issue. I’ll be writing about these developments in a later column. For the time being, it’s worth noting that new suppliers, such as Rocketseed, have started to emerge to provide services to help companies manage their communications with business individuals.
However, there’s a long way to go. One area I’d like to see more activity is in marketing planning, including analysis and segmentation. I’d like to see more companies identifying opportunity that exist with business individuals, and how this opportunity might be translated into profit by a stronger proposition for business individuals. I’d also like to see more companies find ways to allow business individuals to identify themselves, coming (as seen from the supplier’s point of view) from either the consumer or business side of the fence.
