Business to Business Marketing

Until perhaps the mid 1980s there was a general tendency to treat the subject of marketing as if it had several more or less discrete, subordinate areas of study; bodies of literature therefore emerged dealing with, for example, international marketing, services marketing, societal marketing, and industrial marketing. It was apparently taken as axiomatic by many authors that the differences in product type or of physical environment brought about or justified significant differences in the concepts as well as in the managerial practices involved. More recently, fallacies have been exposed in such a line of thought, to the extent that it is now more generally recognised that where differences do exist they are matters of practice necessitated or facilitated by the environment surrounding the activity, rather than differences in the concept or philosopy of marketing itself.