Classifying businesses

Abstract

Both in business to business and business to consumer marketing, marketing resources can be more efficiently targeted if an organisation has access to 'external' as well as internally sourced information on customers and prospects. But the range and detail of external information accessible to B2C marketers have for many years been considerably greater than taht available to B2B marketers. As a result B2C marketers have had access to a wider range of more sophisticated value-added segmentation services than their B2B counterparts. This is somewhat ironic when one considers that in most markets the variability of business potential between different businesses far exceeds variability in potential btween customers. This paper explains how recent developments in business credit risk management are now making available new sources of external data on businesses; haw this information, when combined with existing business data sources, has been used by Experian to create a multivariate classification of businesses; and the extent to which this new classification is likely to redress the current information imbalance between B2B and B2C marketers