How are airplanes like sneakers?
One comes in a shoebox and the other feels like one.
But srsly, how can these very different categories be similar?
Most of the time, people say that B2B and B2C marketing or branding or advertising are worlds apart. Common sense tells us that they're categorically different. Different branding issues, different market dynamics, different repurchase patterns.
So let’s look at the market for airplanes:
Only 1,900 are sold each year
They cost $70 - $400 million each
The purchase cycle takes years
Entire committees are involved, not just parents or spouses
So the assumption would be that B2B brands like Boeing have loyal customers that stick with them for a while.
And yet here are two patterns from sneakers that nicely fit the market for aircraft:
Double jeopardy: large brands have slightly higher frequency and much higher penetration than small brands (frequency & penetration are positively correlated).
Cross purchase: brands share buyers and do so in proportion to their market share.
This data comes from Dag Bennett and shows that the buying and selling of massive aircraft looks a lot like the buying and selling of sneakers. Further, the model for how people buy sneakers nicely fits the data for airplanes.
Is there some unexplained variance? Of course. Do B2B businesses differ in important ways? Yes. And these deviations from the laws can mean millions in revenue or profit. (In the case of airlines, the cross purchase patterns show that the two small brands are kind of in their own “small craft” market.)
Marketers always say, “But my brand is different! My category’s different!” Of course it is.
But it's really important to see the universal patterns, not just the differences. This way you don't wish for the impossible (“We’ll be small but will have massive loyalty!”), and you can learn from your deviations from the expected patterns.