Business Buying Behavior

Read this chapter, which provides an overview of business-to-business buying behavior. This chapter discusses how B2B markets differ from B2C markets, types of B2B buyers, buying centers, and stages of the B2B buying process. The chapter wraps up with a discussion of international B2B markets, e-commerce, and ethics in the B2B market. From this reading, you will learn what a buying center is and will be able to name the members of buying centers and describe their roles. Pay special attention to the concepts of the decision-making unit (DMU) and the purchase process.

Introduction

In the last chapter, we talked about the buying behavior of consumers - people like you and me who buy products for our own personal use. However, many businesses don't offer their goods and services to individual consumers at all. Instead, their customers are other businesses, institutions, or government organizations. These are the business-to-business (B2B) markets we talked about in Chapter 1 "What Is Marketing?".

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