Communicating with Industrial Buyers

Abstract

There is a general reluctance in industry to accept that the successful planning and implementation of marketing strategies depends largely on having a thorough understanding of organisational buying behaviour. This state of affairs is even more surprising when it is realised that as long ago as 1961 a major American text on industrial marketing was stressing this very point. At that time Alexander, Cross and Hill wrote:

Any attempt to understand the managerial problems of marketing a product or group of products must include at or near its beginning, a study of the persons or establishments that buy or can buy those products. Without a knowledge of his market, the buying units that comprise it, and the working conditions of, and the objectives sought by the purchasers in their operations, the marketing manager finds himself forced to make decisions and formulate programmes in a sort of informational twilight of assumed facts and conditions that can only result in useless error and loss.¹