Business to business (B2B): Until the end of the 20th century a business was understood as the transaction made between an organized group o people selling a product or service to non-organized people, named customers. However, in the last 30 years the term Business to Business has been in use and it means the commercial relation between producers of a product or service and other services and products’ producers. B2B then means the transactions between enterprises, this is, transactions between the producer and the supplier of that product, or between a supplier and a retail business (Biemans, 2018). These companies receiving the products are not necessarily businesses, but all kind of institutions:
B2B marketing is the marketing of products or services to companies, government bodies, institutions and other organizations that use them to produce their own products or services or sell them to other B2B customers […] B2B customers are not always for-profit firms, but also include schools, hospitals, courthouses, political parties, zoos, ministries and libraries. A courthouse buys photocopiers, computers,
desks and filing cabinets, for example, while a zoo purchases cages, building materials, animals and fresh produce (Biemans, 2018).
This also shows that while sometimes institutions receiving these products use them to then produce their own products, there are also lots of them that takes the products for their own needs. B2B transactions have been growing in size and some of them can be valued in some billion dollars: “General Motors’ global parts purchasing budget for 2006, for example, was $85 billion!” (Biemans, 2018).