Page 213 - Marketing Management

190 PART 3 CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

Like many business-to-business
firms, software giant SAS
emphasizes its corporate brand in
its marketing efforts.

business publications such as BusinessWeek, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. One TV spot that ex-
emplifies SAS’s rebranding effort ran like this:
The problem is not harvesting the new crop of e-business information. It’s making sense of it.With
e-intelligence from SAS, you can harness the information.And put the knowledge you need within
reach. SAS.The Power to Know.

Subsequent research showed that SAS had made the transition to a mainstream business decision-
making support brand and was seen as both user-friendly and necessary. Highly profitable and now
one of the world’s largest privately owned software companies, more than doubling its revenue stream
since the brand change, SAS has met with just as much success inside the company. For 14 years,
Fortune magazine has ranked it one of the best U.S. companies to work for; in 2010 the company was
number one. 24

Targeting Firms and Buying Centers
Successful business-to-business marketing requires that business marketers know which types of
companies to focus on in their selling efforts, as well as who to concentrate on within the buying
centers in those organizations.