Strategic decisions for business-type specific marketing in industrial goods markets

Abstract

In considering the benefits from a structured approach to industrial marketing, the starting point is given by business reality: industrial marketing practice covers an immense and highly heterogeneous variety of transactional processes in marketing industrial goods, ranging from marketing standard screws to computer integrated manufacturing systems or nuclear power stations.²⁹ If marketing science (or, as Kotler (1972) puts it, marketing management science) aims at reaching beyond pure description in order to develop recommendations for business practice as it has been demanded by many scholars, it is faced with a dilemma³⁰: the heterogeneous variety of transaction situations in business practice renders any attempt to develop a marketing program which is universally applicable regardless of particularities of the transaction situation pointless. On the other hand, normative statements that solely refer to one specific situation or marketing problem will hardly deserve the label “science”.³¹ Hence, there is a need for a systematic approach which combines some abstraction from particularities in order to go beyond considerations of individual cases, with a more differentiated view on marketing problems than can be achieved by a general “one-for-all” marketing programme.³² Grouping transactions according to some criteria which are decisive for the way buyers and sellers come to agree on the exchange and carry it out seems a promising way to handle this. This procedure is referred to as “structuring” in the following, regardless of the concrete method and attributes of the grouping (content of criteria, number of groups, etc.). In industrial marketing, a particularly popular approach to structuring is the typological approach.³³