As easy as 123, B2B!
You may know what B2B means, but what about B2C,C2C, and C2B? Let’s talk about it in today’s episode!
This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
In 2007, I took my first marketing class. I was in my late 20s and, unlike almost everyone else in the classroom, I’d actually worked in marketing for several years at that point, managing Marketing & PR for several different publishing companies.
Now, if you know me, you’d probably assume I rushed into the class, sat down in the front row and started eagerly taking notes. And if you were talking to the Sean of today, yeah, that’s pretty much what I would have done.
But this was a basic course for business school students, taught in a large lecture hall with about 80 people in the room during the summer term. I was pretty sure this class was going to be an easy “A”, so I slipped into the middle of the room somewhere and positioned myself to be able to play around on my laptop if the professor started to be too boring.
But as class started, in strode a senior professor who had very little interest in students who didn’t want to be there. He warned us that we’d better pay attention because he didn’t like to repeat himself, and he also was unwilling to give us any of his slides. “Take good notes,” he said. And since this was before the days of the iPhone, most of us didn’t have cameraphones or webcams that were up to grabbing hi-res images, nor would he have allowed us to do it anyhow.
The professor then launched into a lecture that caught be completely off guard because it was so dense and focused on not just defining marketing as a core business activity, but trying to cover all of its applications. And that’s where I first came across four number and letter combinations I’d never heard before:
B2C, B2B, C2C and C2B.
Now if you, like me, have a degree in marketing or have worked in the field for awhile, you probably have a good handle on what these terms mean. But I’m also not going to take for granted that you do, because a lot of people who practice marketing don’t actually have any formal training in it, and they wind up picking up the lingo as they go. That’s exactly what I was doing before I went to business school.
So we’re going to do a quick review of these four terms, but then I’m going to talk about something I find truly interesting:
Thanks to the internet, which is where we get these terms in the first place, the line between many of these types of businesses is getting pretty fuzzy.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The acronyms B2C and B2B don’t really originate from the world of marketing, at least not in the way they’re used today. According to journalist Kevin Maney, who wrote about business and technology for USA Today, the terms really came into common usage in the late 1990s when venture capitalists in the dotcom tech space were throwing around all sorts of acronyms and jargony terms to describe this emerging field of ecommerce.
Interestingly, Maney says that these terms were originally written in lowercase letters, but shifted to uppercase as they came into more common usage. Or, as he jokes in his piece looking back on the history of the terms, maybe they matured after the dot com bust. It’s anyone’s guess.
I had always presumed that these terms must have come from an academic paper or 2×2 grid somewhere, but from what I can tell, that came later. Ecommerce required some descriptors to help investors know what sort of dotcom they were investing in, and the terms arose more or less organically from the tech industry.
But the term that seems to have the oldest common usage is “business to business,” which became “b2b” under this new parlance. The idea of business to business commerce is, of course, either selling directly to other businesses or helping to facilitate sales between other businesses.
These types of businesses go by a number of other names depending upon their function – “professional services”, “agencies,” “wholesalers” or “consultants” being just a few examples – but the gist is that they don’t deal with consumers directly. They focus instead on corporate customers, who are often referred to as “accounts”.
But traditionally, product companies tended to keep their capabilities in-house and only go outside for very specific functions like legal, advertising, printing or auditing or for supply chain relationships like raw material procurement, manufacturing or downstream sales like wholesale distributors or retailers. These companies tended to view themselves as consumer-facing, at the very least, and would thus fall under the category of what we now call B2C, or business to consumer.
In ecommerce, retailers were a natural fit for the B2C categorization – they sold products directly to consumers, just like their brick and mortar counterparts. But an increasing number of manufacturers and services also wanted to get into the B2C space by utilizing the internet, putting less reliance on complex and expensive networks of brokers and middlemen and establishing a stronger connection with the actual customers.
One example would be insurance plans. In the 1990s and the decades before them, if you wanted to buy insurance, you’d usually go to an agent who represented a specific brand or you’d go to a broker who represented many brands and get all of your information from them. They would be your point of contact for signing up for the plan and they would also provide you with service and support.
But the internet allowed insurance plans to directly connect with interested consumers and potentially cut out the need for having agents or brokers get in the way. Some plans simply used those connections as lead generators for their existing sales forces, sure, but others created a parallel process where potential customers could enroll in services directly. That was the newfound power of B2C.
C2C, by contrast, treats the business as a platform that puts the power in the hands of the consumers, and it’s about one person selling something to another person and the platform taking a commission, such as you’d find on sites like eBay or Etsy or Teachers Pay Teachers.
And even this gets a bit murky, because there are an awful lot of businesses that use sites like these to sell products, sometimes identifying themselves as such and other times creating fictious personas so they don’t give away the fact that you’re not buying from a solopreneur handcrafting items or selling cherished items from their personal collection, but instead, just somebody with a warehouse full of goods to sell you.
Or drop-ship to you from China. But that’s another story for another time.
C2C interactions can also involve non-professionals providing goods or services to other consumers for money, and they don’t have to involve ecommerce at all. One good example would be when I hire a teenager to come petsit for me. They don’t own a business and they’re not doing it for a living – they’re just getting paid a small amount of money to do a service for me.
A garage sale or swap meet table would be another great example of C2C interactions. So would printing out custom orders on your 3D printer for a small fee.
But C2C doesn’t have to be small potatoes stuff. Some businesses start out as a C2C side hustle and turn into a formal B2C interaction over time. In fact, it’s growing increasingly difficult to understand where the line blurs between B2C and C2C sometimes because there are so many people who build online audiences to whom they directly market and sell products or solicit payment for their art, content or services without formally going into business and paying the appropriate taxes for it. That’s as much a problem for regulators as it is for those of us who like categories to be neat and tidy, and I suspect the line will continue to get fuzzier over time.
Then there’s C2B, which was a pretty meaningless term during the dotcom boom, but which has started to take on more of a meaning as businesses have evolved around offering “gigs,” a term that used to be pretty much just a music industry idea but now encompasses a whole range of jobs thanks to a 2009 Daily Beast article from Tina Brown called “The Gig Economy” that redefined the term to mean consumers selling their services to businesses in exchange for splitting the proceeds.
This includes services like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Doordash, Taskrabbit, Fiverr and more where freelance workers – or “gig economy workers,” if you prefer – can take on jobs to provide services such as personal shopping or providing transportation or building things.
And you might ask, “hey, Sean, isn’t this also sort of what temporary workers and day laborers do?” And I’d respond, “absolutely!” But of course when these terms were being coined to fit into ecommerce discussions among venture capitalists, nobody was seriously thinking about using dotcoms for that purpose. Things have changed a lot in the last 27 years.
But it’s not the only application of B2C. There may also be consumers who are serving not as workers, but actual suppliers for specific things like handmade items, baked goods, small batch artisan goods, organic produce and so forth. And of course there are freelancers who are selling discrete services like graphic design, illustration, data analysis, content creation, video production or editing, ghostwriting and so on who are all targeting business customers – usually small businesses with limited budgets, media companies with specific needs that don’t justify a full-time employee or really savvy agencies or marketing teams trying to break out of their established ways of thinking.
So I’ve covered our four acronyms, but I’ve missed a couple that aren’t as commonly used today despite still being very viable. One of those is B2G, which means business to government, and it’s also called B2A, which means business to administration. That encapsulates a pretty large segment of the economy, actually, because there are a lot of companies out there that focus on fulfilling government contracts at the federal, state or municipal level. Sometimes it’s only part of their business and other times it’s their sole focus. My dry cleaner, for example, is a B2C operation but has contracts with the local police department to handle their uniforms. But there are many companies that will only accept government work and aren’t interested in serving consumers at all.
And it doesn’t have to be the sorts of companies who are defense contractors, road crews or who provide vending in government buildings, either. The Centene Corporation, a large company here in St. Louis, is a business that largely serves as an intermediary for government healthcare programs, and that’s very typical B2A stuff.
There’s another term called B2B2C, and I honestly hadn’t come across this one until recently, but it’s being used in some circles to describe those longer supply chains where there’s distance between the manufacturer and the consumer. As best I can tell, this term is not being used to describe more traditional brand manufacturers or private label manufacturers, but rather the sort of marketplace stuff you find on Amazon and Alibaba that’s coming directly from factories that are mostly in China but which has a fake brand name slapped on it.
I’m also seeing it applied to dropshipping and affiliate programs, though to me, those tend to be more B2C2C because the person in the middle is more often than not a solopreneur trying to rustle up some cash.
Personally, I think having to lengthen the term to account for suggests that maybe this categorization system is a bit flawed in the first place. But it’s still helpful to know these terms even if they’re imperfect because so many people use them in the corporate world.
And the heart of marketing is great communication, so if there are terms that help us to gain a better understanding of how we fit into the marketplace, we might as well use them!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
PLUG
This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.
Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.
While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.
You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/
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