Adopting a B2C Mindset In a B2B Business

Caid Christiansen• September, 18 2015

In the traditional model of textbook sales, publishers focused their efforts on the educators. With instructors and administrators in charge of selecting the books used in their classes, textbook publishers were able to effectively influence sales without ever targeting the end user: the students.

But, as highlighted in the recent article, “A Textbook Market Strategy That Moves Beyond Professors” from Inside Higher Ed, publishers are starting to try and directly engage students in their sales and marketing efforts.

On their approach to the students, Dawn Keller, senior vice president of consumer and digital marketing at Cengage (a division of McGraw-Hill) said, “We have to develop relationships and engage them and understand them as consumers as much as we engage with faculty. It’s not an ‘or’ strategy. It’s an ‘and’ strategy.”

There’s a growing shift within traditional B2B markets for companies to try and reach past their sales outlets and directly to the end user.

Take Apple’s iPhone strategy. At its peak, Blackberry accounted for 42.6 percent of US smartphone market, driven largely by a B2B strategy. Because the Blackberry catered to the needs of IT managers, RIM focused on a locked-down ecosystem, relying on the IT managers to drive corporate employees to use the Blackberry devices.

What RIM failed to recognize was that the iPhone would create enough of an improved experience that their model would be turned on its head. When corporate workers (and managers) started demanding that their IT departments support the iPhone, eventually Apple was able to crack RIM’s stranglehold on the business smartphone market.

And while textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill may never be able to completely move to a B2C model, having a presence in that market is reaping benefits. This lets them strike the balance between acquiring customers and keeping their resellers (like campus bookstores) happy.

“We purposefully work to strike that balance,” Keller said. She described CengageBrain as the “first frontier” of learning about student behavior. If, for example, sales data from CengageBrain shows more students are buying access codes to digital course materials, then the company can inform resellers of that trend, she said.

Intensely focusing on improving user experience, gathering consumer data, and learning to “market” to the end user are all strategies that B2B companies should employ to make sure that they are staying relevant in their market.