Shorthand describing who a business primarily sells to. B2B (business-to-business) means a company's customers are other businesses. B2C (business-to-consumer) means customers are individual consumers. B2B2C describes a business that sells through another business to eventually reach an end consumer.
Why it matters
These categories shape nearly every part of a go-to-market strategy — sales cycle length, decision-maker complexity, marketing channels, and typical deal size all differ substantially between B2B and B2C, which is why strategies built for one rarely transfer cleanly to the other.
In a sentence
"Our marketing playbook is built for B2B, with longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders — a B2C team at a similarly sized company would be optimizing for completely different things."
Related terms
- Often confused with: ICP (B2B/B2C/B2B2C describes the general category of buyer; ICP is a much more specific, detailed profile of the ideal buyer within that category).