Lying behind every consumer purchase in a modern economy there is a network of business-to
business transactions. Even an apparently simple transaction at the supermarket is only made
possible by a web of supporting b2b transactions. In this chapter our aims are to clarify just what is
meant by business markets, to explain why it is considered necessary to distinguish them from
consumer markets, and to show how business products and markets can be classified. In order to
emphasize that business markets involve both goods and services, we start off by looking at the
industrial structure of modern economies, to see how influential the service sector has become. The
subsequent section deals with the core idea of this chapter. Namely that business markets can be
differentiated from consumer markets along a number of dimensions: market structure differences,
buying behavior differences, and marketing in practice differences.