Traditionally, when one hears the term "marketing", it calls to mind images of consumer packaging and advertising campaigns. Business to business marketing is expected to minimize that image in the next decade. How will this image be minimized? Researchers expect business-to-business marketing to total 2.7 trillion to 6 trillion dollars compared to 269 billion dollars in the latter years. There is becoming such a significant shift in the dynamics of marketing because business-to-business marketing has become vital to the selling of products and services to business, institutional, industrial, or governmental buyers. In the past, innovative products, great engineering, or great salesmanship have been enough to sell a product or service. Now, however, because of shorter product life cycles and intense foreign competition the "build it and they will come" mentality has been replaced. .
Corporations that have relied on industrial sales are now using television, the Web, and retail outlets to gain attention. "Experience branding--feeding on all the senses: scent, sight, sound, texture--is the wave of the future," points out Marian Salzman, director of the Brand Futures Group, a division of advertising conglomerate Young & Rubicam Inc. Branding is the tactic that corporations were oblivious to and had no use for when only targeting other corporations. Now however, branding is the most popular and successful tactic for targeting those same corporations" new buyers, the consumers. One of the big wigs in branding is the Nike Corporation. Nike evolved from a sneaker seller into a purveyor of the athletic experience. Nike fashioned its "swoosh" into a mythical symbol through these steps: "First, turn a select group of athletes into Hollywood-style superstars. Second, pit Nike's 'Pure Sports' and its team of athletic superstars against the rule-obsessed, established sporting world. Third, and most important, brand like mad, writes Naomi Klein, author of No Logo (2000, Picador USA), a critical evaluation of some of the strategies used by corporations to build the world's best-known brands.