Module description
Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing refers to marketing activities between businesses. B2B marketing involves a wide set of activities such as identification of business customer needs, developing products/services which will address unmet needs of business customers,delivering products/services to business customers in an effective and efficient way, deciding on a suitable price for products/services that will balance business customer demand and company profitability, and promoting products/services in a creative way which will generate awareness and willingness to buy among business customers.
This module is specifically designed to provide you with advance knowledge on core concepts and tools of B2B marketing, and recent developments in business marketing practice. It presumes a familiarity with basic marketing concepts and frameworks taught in most undergraduate level courses.
Aims and objectives:
This module is designed to provide students with advance knowledge on central concepts, frameworks and practices in business marketing. On successful completion of the module students will:
- Understand the nature of business markets and their differences from consumer markets.
- Gain advance knowledge about business marketing theories and recent developments in business marketing practice.
- Understand the critical elements of business marketing strategies and plans.
- Be able to identify and suggest relevant marketing tools and frameworks to make better marketing decisions in B2B contexts.
On completion of this module, students will be able to;
- Understand the core differences between B2C and B2B marketing strategies.
- Understand and evaluate an organisation’s buying process.
- Design appropriate customer relationship strategies for business markets.
- Design and manage basic brand/product strategies for business markets.
- Design and manage basic distribution strategies for business markets.
- Design and manage basic pricing strategies for business markets.
- Design and manage basic communication strategies for business markets.
Assessment details
Examination (75%)
Group Project (25%)
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of this module, you will be able to:
- Understand the core differences between B2C and B2B marketing environments.
- Evaluate an organisation’s buying behaviour.
- Define and analyse the target segments based on macro and micro factors.
- Critically assess, design and manage key business marketing mix strategies in business markets.
Teaching pattern
Across the semester teaching is expected to comprise of:
- 30 hours combination of lectures, cases and in-class exercises
You will also be expected to spend time preparing for classes and working on the assessment tasks each week. The combined hours of classes and independent learning should equate to at least 15 hours a week.
Suggested reading list
The module uses a number of specialist journal articles and book chapters. For an overview of the types of subjects covered in the module, the following book is recommended:
Michael D. Hutt and Thomas W. Speh (2017) Business Marketing Management: B2B, 12th EMEA edition, Cengage Learning