An Evaluation of the Marketing Process in B2B and B2C Startups

Sammanfattning: Marketing is a key function for all organizations and is seen as essential in order to achieve success when launching a new business. Following from the overwhelming amount of accessible data for companies, there exist an urge to understand what activities to include in the marketing process and how to manage them. Despite the vital role and the urge to further understand marketing, there is a lack of research about marketing in the small entrepreneurial business context that is encountered in startups. In addition, a call for further development of empirical research is identified in the business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) dichotomy. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the marketing process used by B2B and B2C Software as a Service (SaaS) startups. This in order to contribute with understanding of the marketing process in the startup context and contribute with development of the research within the B2B and B2C dichotomy. This was done by conducting a multiple case study where the empire was collected from four SaaS startups either selling to consumers or businesses. The empirical findings of the study show that the customer type, being a consumer or a business, affects the marketing process. Both differences and similarities were identified between the marketing process applied in the B2B and the B2C startups. Due to different levels of knowledge within the companies and different complexity levels in the buying process differences were found in the evaluation, segmentation, targeting and positioning done by the B2B and the B2C startups. It was found that the B2B companies put in less effort into the market analysis and segmentation compared to the B2C companies. Historically the channels utilized were identified to be different between the segments. However, a trend towards similar targeting channels was identified since the B2B segment is moving towards using more inbound marketing, which already is the main approach applied by the B2C segment. The B2B segment was, compared with the B2C segment, also identified to put more emphasize on achieving a position within the market that radiates credibility. Furthermore, the marketing process was found to be approached differently in startups than what was suggested in literature due to the lacking attention given to the scare resources and the innovative environment of a startup. A suggestion was therefore provided of how the marketing process better could be adapted to the startup context by including a feedback loop, making the marketing process more iterative.