You have surely heard the saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This statement couldn’t be more true. It is not as if we don’t know that there has been a world before our own. Every day we walk past ancient structures and buildings, take for granted our friends with wisdom from an age-old global perspective, and live in the shadow of people who had centuries to know what we call common sense. Yet somehow, in spite of all this evidence to the contrary, many people still think they can invent some new kind of business marketing that will succeed where so many others have failed.
One of the most common questions on the minds of all business people is, “How do I get new customers and keep my old customers coming back?” The answer to this question is really quite simple. All you have to do is ask yourself, which of the following two statements is more likely to be true: Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at How to spell business plural. The word “business” has three distinct forms. If you are referring to a specific type of business (say, barbering or plumbing), then you would spell it as one word with no hyphen: “business.
Business marketing is a timeless principle – its practice goes back as far as the human race itself. The skills and knowledge used to create early forms of business marketing are the same ones you use right now – perhaps with different tools, but it remains essentially unchanged.
History can tell us a great deal about what will work in business marketing, what won’t, and why. We are not forced to reinvent the wheel every time we try to improve things. It is easy to forget that most problems we face are already well-known – others have faced them before, and you can draw from their experiences.
Problems In Business Marketing
In business marketing, there are two major problems you must understand: demand generation, and how to build a customer base. Before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers or artisans working for hours on end in order to sustain themselves. Trade was for the elite only; a common man could not afford to trade with anyone beyond his village. Over time this began to change; machines and factories allowed quicker production of more goods at lower cost. Business marketing also began to change as more and more people became involved in trading.
The problem was that there were not enough customers to buy from all the producers. When this happens, the producers have to fight for a cut of a pie that is too small for everyone. There were two options for sellers: either liquidate and go out of business, or fight it out. In most cases, the answer was both, as merchants began fighting for market share in an ever-escalating war of attrition.
Innovations in Business Marketing
The earliest business marketing innovators realized that there was money to be made from these land and labor disputes by stepping into the middle of it all. These newly-minted “middle men” were able to settle disputes, make agreements and agreements, and sell goods more efficiently. They became known to history as “merchants.” The merchants could be hired by the various factions to settle their differences and provide the distribution for the goods produced.
Over time, more things were traded on trade routes that grew longer and longer, eventually extending all around the world. This business-to-business marketing allowed for huge leaps in technology, since it allowed people from a single city or village to reach customers all over the world. Experience with this practice helped inform further innovations in business marketing.
Business Marketing Innovators
The first business marketing innovator was a man named Joseph Dupont. He realized that by capitalizing on the demand for silk from China, he could make a fortune in trade, and use some of the money to finance his own production of silk. He formed a monopoly on silk that later made him the richest man in France. But Dupont wasn’t satisfied with being rich; he also wanted to be king. So he began cutting deals with poorer Frenchmen to help him gain political power through campaign financing and other less-than-legal methods.
Dupont was a highly cultured man, who started several institutions that would later become world famous. The Chinese government immediately shut him down, and his silk monopoly soon collapsed because he could not properly store and ship the silk. His failure to be a successful businessman, however, did not keep him from becoming one of France’s most famous kings.
The second business marketing innovator was a man named John Jacob Astor. He decided to change direction in business marketing by opening a fur trading company that would supply goods for the American market. Astor had more success, as his methods of importing goods from China and selling them in America became the standard applied throughout industry as well as trade.
Today, business marketing is all about understanding customers and prospects’ needs, then doing everything in your power to deliver them what they want and need. Successful businesses always get it right: they understand customers’ needs, and provide the best possible goods or services that meet those needs, then they give the highest incentives to their sales force to sell them into those markets.
