Buying Center Influences

Buying centers usually include participants with differing interests, authority, status, susceptibility to persuasion, and sometimes very different decision criteria. Engineers may want to maximize product performance; production people may want ease of use and reliability of supply; financial staff focus on the economics of the purchase; purchasing may be concerned with operating and replacement costs.

Business buyers also have personal motivations, perceptions, and preferences influenced by their age, income, education, job position, personality, attitudes toward risk, and culture. Webster cautions that ultimately individuals, not organizations, make purchasing decisions.⁵¹ Individuals are motivated by their own needs and perceptions in attempting to maximize the organizational rewards they earn. But organizational needs legitimate the buying process and its outcomes.

Targeting Firms and Buying Centers

Successful business-to-business marketing requires that business marketers know which types of companies to focus on in their selling efforts, as well as whom to concentrate on within the buying centers in those organizations. Finding the market segments with the greatest growth prospects, most profitable customers, and most promising opportunities for the firm is crucial. A slow-growing economy has put a stranglehold on large corporations’ purchasing, making small and midsize business markets more attractive for suppliers, as discussed in “Marketing Insight: Big Sales to Small Businesses.”

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