B2B Marketer
Issue No. 52 - April/May 2010
B2B Survival of the swiftest
by Kimon Lycos
Globalisation has been a massive beast to deliver customers more choice, more often and more on their terms. It has made gift buying almost pointless. When travelling, you encounter the same cheap crap everywhere so it’s hard to find something that does not already exist in your hometown.
The world is incredibly small, and the challenge for many B2B marketers is to keep up with the pace of customer requirements. Many sectors of B2B are marching to the beat of consumer needs. If demand for cars goes up, then so too the pressure for automotive suppliers, to produce components, robotics and better ways of banging tin - a point I’ll highlight later on.
All too often you will find companies who do not value their time. They deliver very valuable services for free hoping to secure an order, at times giving up the IP they create which is mostly production based. I wonder what the impact would be if companies reported time in their balance sheets?
The easiest way to sum this up is that long lead times increase costs, so the opposite is true; short lead times reduce costs. But short lead times also increase revenues, improve customer satisfaction and boost competitiveness.
B2B has many roots in consumer markets, seeming many companies are part of a supply chain, where the final outcomes of all efforts can be to produce furniture, dolls, makeup or cars. So what happens in consumer markets has a ripple effect all along the supply chain.
Consider the massive changes to car manufacturing.
Back in the late ‘70s, Detroit divided markets into 18 segments. Now there are close to 40, along with a host of customised extras involving trim, entertainment, navigation, warning systems and engines. Imagine being a supplier to this industry, needing to tool and retool for all the different trends. No wonder there has been so much consolidation and sharing of parts.
A real impact all of this has on suppliers is that the further back they hap...
