I thought the following table by Holger Schulze provides a good high level summary representation of how B2B marketing has changed and what skill set marketers need today. In speaking with several different companies and looking at their marketing operations it’s also a good reference and comparison point to evaluate the level of marketing maturity.
I came across an interesting article about brand loyalty. Basically, the notion is that in the current “participation economy” traditional marketing attention and interruption marketing paradigm) is obsolete and that “movements” needs to be generated instead of communication. The reason for this is that most products are good enough, for what they are intended to do, and the way you succeed in branding is to “achieve or create a loyalty without reason”. This means finding that emotional connection by attaching a level of mystery to the brand (the more the consumer knows about the specifics of a brand the less interesting it becomes), because people are today looking for things beyond rational value. The article claims that this applies equally to B-2-B products, and that intimacy, a story, a relationship leads to “unreasonable loyalty”. In addition marketing should be aiming to measure the return on involvement, rather than the return on investment. The above is one of the reasons, for example, why traditional approaches to market research, based on information, knowledge and data, often fails to provide an accurate prediction on the success of a new product. Marketers should forget about focus groups, because in a focus group environment, customers hide their real feelings towards a brand, and therefore, aspects of “unreasonable loyalty” are never uncovered.
Here’s a simple digital marketing model for B-2-B that can be used when planning what the strategy for the web should be and how to measure this. The thinking is that the customer typically have four different types of interactions on the web, depending on where he is in the buying cycle. The customer is either in a learn, buy, use or engage phase. Learn and buy is very much at the core of a new/repeat or modified repeat purchase. Use have both a support and a service aspect to it, and engage is when the customer is idle. The idle phase in particular can be problematic for products , for which a replacement purchase only happens every few years, and the customer therefore is not a “hot prospect” and often “forgotten”. Managing the idle phase takes clever pull marketing, but correctly done, increases the likelihood of a re-purchase. The find in the middle of the chart, reflects the important of search, both external and on-site, regardless of what phase of the buying cycle the customer is in. 
Digital Marketing Model
