06/06/2023
Marketing Strategy: B2C and B2B
Over the past three weeks, I’ve been hectically writing up a marketing strategy for a beverage company, the strategy is composed of both Business-to-client (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) strategies. Through B2C approach, the estimated sales volume is just over 500 000 units per day nationally, this is only a quartile of the overall target market. However, the B2B end reverse-engineer’s commercial distribution as opposed to a direct approach for product placement - the B2C strategy will stimulate enough demand to get the attention of commercial distributors and have them demand to offer product placement.
Both B2C and B2B strategies are great, but they highly depend on your product / service offering, and how your approach to marketing. Unless your product has immediate demand, you have to reverse-engineer demand, this is what the most successful businesses do. With a B2C approach, you have to position your product / service in a space where a significant number of your target market meets, and has an obligation to spend a large portion of its income within a specified period of time - this is exploiting the spending instinct of consumers. People earn income at different times of the month, with this, you will be able to capture a part of every group of earners, meaning there will be demand every week. The same approach can be followed with a B2B strategy, where you approach businesses that have an obligation to spend a certain portion of their revenue within a given period of time, month, or quarter, on related products or services. This is leveraging the needs of the business.
I’ll use our family bakery as an example, which has reverse-engineered demand, it’s a very small bakery been in operation for 27 years, it was started by my late grandfather, with support from the rest of the family then. The business only operates 16 days a month – that’s 4 days a week, it sells out plus minus 1600 packets of baked goods every single day of operation, with a monthly revenue of over R100 000 every single month - without fail. I have seen many bakeries emerge and go over the years, of the same size and smaller, and with some to this day struggling to sell off just 50 - 100 packets of baked goods, and here we have a business that’s existed for over 25 years nonstop and only operates 4 days a week easily sells of over 1500 packets. This points to the power of marketing and positioning when done right. Where is no demand or consumers seem not to be taken by your brand, product, or service, you have to engineer the demand, and you have to position yourself accordingly. Understand where the most money is crowded over a period of time, and position yourself in that space using any form of capital you have at your disposal.
