Understanding the classification of traditional business models

Marketing is just one part of the business function, so before you can market, you need to understand the marketing (business) model of your organization.

You may say I'm not an owner or an entrepreneur, so why do I need to understand the business model?

In fact, for both entrepreneurs and marketers, the foundation of marketing and entrepreneurship is the company and its products and services. So these are the basics before you start marketing and before you create a marketing plan.

What is a business model? A business model is a clichéd but ambiguous term. Some people understand it as profitability, some think it is the product technology process strategy or sales channels and so on. In the past e-commerce based era, we usually divided the business model into three models.

The first one is called B2C, online retailing is one of the e-commerce transactions, which denotes business-to-consumer e-commerce. This form of e-commerce is generally based on online retailing, mainly through the use of the Internet to carry out online activities. For example, like we often see Jingdong, companies sell goods to ordinary customers.

The second is called B2B, which talks about business-to-business e-commerce, such as e-commerce platforms between suppliers and businesses, and a more typical example of this approach is Alibaba.

The third is called C2C, person-to-person, and idle fish is a typical site for consumer-to-consumer transactions.

But the three business models mentioned above, which often describe the business model purely in terms of the type of transaction, are a bit too simple and crude, so I'll talk about a more comprehensive way of defining the business model in the next post, which is called the business model canvas.