Preferred Approaches of Industrial Marketing by Innovative Technology Firms to Enhance the Diffusion of Innovation in the Financial Industry

Sammanfattning: This paper will discuss the challenges that arise in the business-to-business marketing process in the area of highly technological and innovative solutions. The authors will depict the processes that are involved in the business-to-business marketing approach and portray the challenges that arise due to a number of factors, such as trust, customer value and early adoption, when it comes to selling new technology and innovative solutions, and innovations overall, that companies nowadays need, but not necessarily want. The Diffusion of Innovation theory as well as the concept of Relationship Management will be used to put this topic into theoretical frameworks. With the support of existing literature, the qualitative methodologies of this paper are chosen in order to gain knowledge of the preferred approaches of business-to-business marketing. In accordance to this, the authors aim to analyze the diffusion of innovation and how companies today can attain customers not only within the early adopters group, but also the early and later majority, thus increasing market value and share. This exact transition has been analyzed, however not in the exact field of industrial marketing with a focus on the financial industry, though innovation and digitalization is now more important than ever.  Firms need to establish personal and trustworthy relationships with potential and actual customers in order to generate more value and implement necessary innovative solutions. In a survey conducted within the scope of this thesis, respondents emphasize the perceived level of expertise suppliers need in order to initiate collaborations. The focus on innovation and increasing customer and market values through its implementation will be discussed in order to accelerate value generation for all parties involved in an ever-changing digital environment and to fill the research gap within innovation diffusion in industrial marketing.