Almost all of us are familiar with the term advertising. Some of us may even be involved in the field of advertising, either as practitioners or as clients. But there is nobody among us who does not know what advertising does or how it is useful in helping us make a decision. But how many of us know what B2B advertising means? How many of us are even aware of the term? Is it a new kind of advertising? Is B2B advertising a new trend in the advertising industry? Is B2B advertising the herald of things to come? Not really!
Simply put B2B Advertising is nothing but business to business advertising. In the vast majority of advertising that most of us are familiar with, we see examples of B2C or business to consumer advertising. Businesses want to sell to consumers and hence use B2C advertising to achieve that aim. But what abut B2B advertising? As the name suggests, B2B advertising is nothing but advertising that a business uses to advertise its products or services to another business. But why would a business need to advertise to another business through a channel like B2B advertising? Think again and you will find the answer to that question!
Contrary to popular belief, no business produces a product alone. Most products we use in our day to day lives are actually the coming together of the expertise of several businesses. Take the everyday automobile for instance. Let’s say you own a Ford car. Now while Ford Motors may have produced the finished product and sold it to you through a dealer, there are several other companies and businesses in the background that have put together your car. The steering wheel for instance could have been
manufactured by one business. The seats and upholstery could have been manufactured by another business. Even the body of the car and the engine itself could have been manufactured by wholly different businesses. Ford Motors therefore is little more than a collating agency that brings together all the products manufactured by different businesses to produce an automobile that you buy and use.
This is where B2B advertising comes into the picture. Each individual business that manufactures different parts of the car uses B2B advertising to reach out to other businesses. Which is why Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler could all have procured their steering wheels from a single manufacturer! And how do these businesses use B2B advertising? Through what has come to be known as strategic publications. You will rarely find B2B advertising in the mainstream newspapers. That is almost exclusively reserved for B2C advertising. But in strategic publications, which are publications specific to one particular industry, B2B advertising is the mainstay. Unlike in the mainstream advertising channels like newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet, strategic publications almost never publish B2C advertising! They are dedicated to publishing B2B advertising, which has grown into a billion dollar industry. And the biggest and the best of the agencies too have B2B advertising divisions to cater to this part of the revenue.
