Key business dilemmas & the marketing remit in business-to-business marketing services

Various studies examining the business trends and utilisation of marketing techniques have been undertaken by the authors in many fields of marketing services, including advertising, public relations and strategic marketing consultancy. Recently, these findings have been updated through a survey of practitioners' views. From these findings, this paper first explores the core underlying business trends and key resulting marketing issues facing these providers of marketing services. The discussion then expands to examine how these businesses themselves utilise the marketing toolkit, benchmarking current practices against the ‘textbook’ view of good marketing endeavour. For these providers of marketing services the understanding and use of marketing per se differ quite significantly, but all acknowledge the need to improve their own strategic and tactical marketing practices.