Besonderheiten in der Vermarktung von Industriegütern mit Fokus auf das Buying-Center-Konzept

The maintopic of this paper is organizational buying behavior. Because of this, participants of the decision process will be analyzed regarding evaluation and decision criteria. In addi-tion, the buying decision process will be examined and will be discussed against the back-ground of theoretical concepts and models, in which the buying-center concept of Webster and Wind is in the center of the paper’s considerations. Due the high relevance for the com-mercialization of industrial goods, the importance of emotional and rational decision criteria of the buying process will be examined, with special regard to the information seeking behav-ior of the members of the buying-center. With the use of a qualitative research design, gen-eral information about the composition of the buying-center, characteristics about the com-mercialization of industrial goods and the information seeking behavior will be generated through the analysisof expert interviews.In addition, the paper gives insights into the im-portance of emotional factors within organizational buying decisions.A central finding of the analysis is the statement that the degree of rational behavior during the buying process de-pends on the firm size. Bigger companies tend to have a higher degree of formalization and are therefore better protected against emotional buying decisions.The buying process of smaller companies is more likely to differ from the theoretical findings as the buying process seems to be exposed to greater uncertainty.