B2B Marketing Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

B2B Marketing - Assignment Example suppliers management quality and timely supply of materials to C4U. Card for you (C4U) is a small to medium sized UK firm manufacturing greeting cards. Since its establishment in 1990, C4U with its 50 employee producing silk embroidered designed mounted hand made card. C4U is marketing its products with notion of personal touch and setting its cards apart from other card manufacturers. Due to specialize products positioning C4U charged customers almost double the cost in comparison to other card makers. Consumers see this price as good value for money. Consumers are mostly from middle class. Though C4U turnover has increased, its only in the last year down turn in sales make its promoters to think about its functioning. Company uses sales agent on commission basis to contact with retailers and having different types of retail outlets. It uses exhibitions and events for promotion. Raw materials are purchased locally and labour force is also local and unskilled. C4U sometimes faces problems of supply in short notice. Card market condition of UK is get ting saturated. So in near future C4U has to device certain strategies to improve sales. They have to think about consumers and intermediaries and work on different options like customer segments, product range, channel management, marketing communication polices, the way competitors device their strategies, supply chain management and finally the overall marketing system. Creating A Value Network: Value network is a system of partnership and alliances that a firm creates to source, augment and deliver its offering (Kotler, 2003). The value network perspective yields several insights. First, a company can estimate whether more money is made upstream or down stream, second it is more aware of disturbances anywhere in the supply-chain that might cause costs process or supplies to change suddenly and third, value network partners can link through technology for faster, less costly and more accurate communications, transactions and payments. (Adapted from, Hemil, Jukka. Information technologies for value network integration. Espoo 2002. VTT Tiedotteita -Research Notes 2149. 97 p. + app. 1 p.) Accessed from website http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/tiedotteet/2002/T2149.pdf. The picture shows that how at the different level core company has been integrated to supply chain management and customer relation management. Technologies have enabled the companies to integrate effectively and efficiently. Most producers do not sell directly to the final users. Marketing Channels Between producers and customers stands a set of intermediaries that perform various functions; these intermediaries constitute marketing channels, set of interdependent organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available, for use or consumption (Stern & El-Ansary, 1996). Marketing channels have different levels as shown in the fig. i.e. number of intermediaries varies in different types of channels. Levels of marketing channels Accessed from the website http://www.upe.ac.za/documents/busman/SU10.pdf Marketing channel decisions are among the most critical decisions, which have to be faced by management, because the chosen channels intimately affect all the other marketing decisions. Corey (1991; Ch. 5) observed; "a distribution system is a key external resource. Normally it takes years to build, advertisement