"Hardly a week goes by without someone saying the worlds of B2B and B2C marketing are converging," Gary Slack wrote recently in this blog.
To picture the two worlds as one, he asks us to imagine a place where municipalities buy equipment on impulse, and manufacturers buy machinery and materials without due diligence.
"Were this all to start happening," Gary says, "pigs would be flying, too.
"Consumer and business purchasers and purchases are just too different—always have been and always will be."
But what if… just what if, instead of businesses, consumers changed?
In that alternate world:
- All consumers would have split personalities (at least six, called a "team").
- Before every purchase, they would email an inscrutable document to at least 15 suppliers, and demand a response within 10 days.
- All consumers would postpone their purchases until their incomes are certain.
- AdAge would be repackaged as an insert in O, and B2C would collapse into B2B, forming a supercontinent named Omnicom.
Stranger things have happened...
In a pig's eye.
