Johannesburg - The important implication of active purchasing behaviour and passive purchasing behaviour is not the question of whether the buyer or the supplier will be in control.
Countless possibilities and tools are becoming available. Buyers and suppliers get new cockpits equipped with modern joysticks and new precision instruments. For marketing policy new strategic choices must be made. A company can decide to be the kind of supplier that active purchasing customers come across, that is, to provide a comprehensive range of goods, excellent service, price, terms and conditions of delivery, guarantees and everything a critical potential buyer seeks. This approach requires careful and definite positioning in the market.
The other option involves targeting consumers who are passive purchasers. Each element in the mix of marketing tools so well described by Philip Kotler in Marketing Management - Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control can be ascribed varying values, depending on the strategic choices mentioned above.
Traders and wholesalers deserve special mention. It is often said that these professional groups will simply disappear as buyers and sellers do business with each other directly.
In my opinion, however, the trading professions have gained new opportunities. If traders and wholesalers can combine and build up information on both buyers and sellers, they might come to occupy a new position of power. This could lead to a new phase in the marketing process.
Information technology (IT) has far-reaching consequences for commercial strategy, marketing and sales. Those who decide to target the initiating, critical active purchaser can save themselves the expense of a marketing database.
Those suppliers who choose to approach the right customers with suitable offers at the proper time will use an entirely different set of marketing tools and will become a new kind of company which will, to a large extent, be steering the market by means of using the information gathered in its database.
It will remain possible to approach these passive purchasers without a database by using mass media in order to appeal strongly to a number of primary drives. The revolutions in IT and media will take us into the new marketing era.
Paul Postma is the European director for marketing and customer relations management at Ernst & Young and the author of The New Marketing Era - Marketing to the Imagination in a Technological Driven World. He will be a speaker at the Marketing & Sales Success 1999 Convention presented by the Institute of Marketing Management from August 24 to 26 1999.