Question

In the B2B market is Boeing. Boeing makes airplanes for companies to fly. In the B2B market they have close relationships with a few customers, and they don’t need to spend money on marketing tactics. The forecasting approach that I believe would be most appropriate for use in developing a marketing plan would be sales force composite. Sales force composite would be the best forecasting method because the salespeople know their customers best. Additionally, this forecasting method is very fast and cheap which for B2B customers there does not need to be marketing tactics because they deal with a few customers and base their selling on relationships. The forecasting approaches that I believe would be least appropriate would be the Delphi Method. This method would use questionnaires and it takes a lot of time. For forecasting a marketing plan using expert would be the least appropriate for B2B market.

In the B2C market is McDonalds. McDonalds provides food directly for its customers. McDonalds services many customers a day, they use mass communication and spend a lot of money on marketing tactics. The forecasting approach that I believe would be most appropriate for use in developing a marketing plan would be market survey. You would be able to figure out what customers are looking for and plan on buying. Desirable product features may also be discovered. The forecasting approaches that I believe would be least appropriate would be sales force composite. The reason why this would be least appropriate is because this forecasting method is based on relationship building and is best for a handful of customers vs thousands in which McDonalds has.

Please respond in 100-150 words

Answer 1

Business to Business ( B2B ) sales refers to techniques and best practices used by companies with products and services sold to other businesses . So there is always a few number of consumers for the product . Sales force composite is regarded as the best forecasting method in this case . In this marketing technique , due to few customers the sales persons know their customers very well .

The Delphi method that uses the questionnaire method of forecasting is usually for large samples or a method followed when we try to forecast a variable for a huge population of customers . Even expert analysis is not required because that would again mean lot of investment in forecasting .

But in case of B2C marketing where the business sells directly to consumers , marketing and advertisement is of utmost importance . Larger the consumer base larger will be the profits . So for a food chain like Mc. donalds , spending on advertisements and marketing is essential to compete in a monopolistically competitive environment . So in this case survey method used for a large sample or population would be most appropriate . Sales force composite that is only feasible for a handful of customers and is primarily build on relationship building is highly inappropriate .

In B2B one does'nt have to bother regarding the customer volume since there are very few but opposite is the case in B2C .