Experts Cite Innovation as Critical to the B2B Future
BtoB Marketing Trends Study
by Dr. Ralph Oliva of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets

Surmounting the greatest challenges facing business-to-business marketing for the rest of this decade requires significant attention and major investments in innovation, according the Institute for the Study of Business (ISBM) and its B-to-B Marketing Trends 2010 Study.

The ISBM, a research and management center of excellence supported by 70 member corporations and headquartered at Penn State, surveys business marketers and B2B academic and consulting experts every two years. ISBM asks them to identify the most critical challenges marketers will encounter and the capabilities needed to overcome them.

Results of the exclusive study cite seven critical issues for marketers through 2010:

1. Understanding deep customer needs in new ways.
2. Identifying new opportunities for organic business growth.
3. Improving value management techniques and tools.
4. Calculating better marketing performance and accountability metrics.
5. Competing and growing in global markets, particularly China.
6. Countering the threat of product and service commoditization by bringing innovative offerings to market faster, and moving to more competitive business models.
7. Convincing C-level executives to embrace the marketing concept and support robust marketing programs.

The top seven trends point to key fundamentals of the marketing discipline. As the experts tell it, overcoming those challenges requires significant innovation in products and services along with new strategic business models.

Meeting the first challenge of better understanding customers, for example, requires deeply probing the individual and organizational behaviors and emotions influencing business buying decisions. Innovative study designs must reach “beyond traditional market research [to] inherent product and process understanding,” a respondent said. Related innovation, reaching beyond the commonplace ways of assessing customer value, copes with the third challenge on ISBM’s list.

Product and service innovation obviously takes center stage for surmounting the second challenge, finding growth opportunities. New-to-the-world innovation breakthroughs produce genuine growth platforms and competitive superiorities in business markets.

The need for better marketing metrics, the fourth marketing trend, includes better predictive measures for innovation projects at each development stage. The need becomes ever more urgent as marketers confront global competitors in foreign and domestic markets—the fifth most critical B2B challenge.

New product development and investing in the right development projects and platforms hinges on a sound development plan—the key to meeting challenge number six and avoiding product commoditization in the marketplace, ISBM’s expert respondents insist. One called for “disciplined processes [for] portfolio management and developing consensus in a decentralized organization quickly,” for example. Said another, “Marketers must become the ‘networked champions of innovation.’”

Finally, leading B2B marketers know that successful new product development is a powerful tool for “marketing the marketing function” to top management: the seventh challenge of winning the admiration, investments, and “seat at the corporate table” marketers need to serve their organizations best.

Clearly, new thinking and more disciplined new product development continue to be essential to the future of business marketing and to the profitability of B2B organizations.

Dr Robert Cooper is a Distinguished Fellow and Dr. Scott Edgett is a Faculty Scholar at the Institute of Business Markets at Penn State University. Stage-Gate Inc. and ISBM have entered into a formal Alliance Program which enables the two organizations to work more closely together to conduct high quality research.

For more information about ISBM and to receive a complimentary copy of the full B-to-B Marketing Trends 2010 Study, contact Ralph A. Oliva, ISBM Executive Director, at roliva@psu.edu.