Page 231 - Marketing Management

208 PART 3 CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

Applications

Marketing Debate Marketing Discussion
How Different Is Business-to-Business B-to-C & B-to-B Concepts
Marketing? Consider some of the consumer behavior topics for business-
Many business-to-business marketing executives lament to-consumer (B-to-C) marketing from Chapter 6. How might
the challenges of business-to-business marketing, main- you apply them to business-to-business (B-to-B) settings?
taining that many traditional marketing concepts and princi- For example, how might noncompensatory models of
ples do not apply. For a number of reasons, they assert that choice work? Mental accounting?
selling products and services to a company is fundamentally
different from selling to individuals. Others disagree, claim-
ing marketing theory is still valid and only requires some
adaptation in marketing tactics.
Take a position: Business-to-business marketing
requires a special, unique set of marketing concepts
and principles versus Business-to-business market-
ing is really not that different, and the basic marketing
concepts and principles apply.

Marketing Excellence rate parent. To build its brand and separate itself from the
accounting firm, Andersen Consulting launched the first
large-scale advertising campaign in the professional
>>Accenture services area. By the end of the decade, it was the
world’s largest management and technology consulting
organization.
In 2000, following arbitration against its former par-
ent, Andersen Consulting was granted its full independ-
ence from Arthur Andersen—but it had to relinquish the
Andersen name. Andersen Consulting was given three
months to find a name that was able to be trademarked in
47 countries, effective and inoffensive in over 200 lan-
guages, and acceptable to employees and clients—and
that corresponded with an available URL. The effort that
followed was one of the largest—and most successful—
rebranding campaigns in corporate history.
As luck would have it, the company’s new name
came from a consultant at the company’s Oslo office,
who submitted “Accenture” as part of an internal name-
generation initiative dubbed “Brandstorming.” The con-
Accenture began in 1942 as Administrative Accounting sultant coined the Accenture name because it rhymed
Group, the consulting arm of accounting firm Arthur with “adventure” and connoted an “accent on the future.”
Andersen. In 1989, it launched as a separate business The name also retained the “Ac” of the original Andersen
unit focused on IT consulting and bearing the name Consulting name (echoing the Ac.com Web site), which
Andersen Consulting. At that time, though it was earning would help the firm retain some of its former brand equity.
$1 billion annually, Andersen Consulting had low brand On midnight, December 31, 2000, Andersen Consulting
awareness among information technology consultancies officially adopted the Accenture name and launched a
and was commonly mistaken for its accounting corpo- global marketing campaign targeting senior executives at