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B2B.

B2B2B. B2B2B2B2B2B2B.

Sounds like Porky Pig, doesn’t it? And just as Porky’s stuttering means nothing until the actual words come along, it doesn’t matter how many B2Bs you have — none of them create any value at all until a B2C happens. B2Bs are all in the middle of a value chain; the end is always B2C — customers consume the goods and provide the money that powers all the rest of it.

The term B2C created a huge potential for “ignorant expertise.” The newness of the term gave some pundits the misguided impression that there’s something fundamentally new about B2C itself, which in turn meant their general-purpose new-economy theories gave them something useful to say about the subject.

The only thing new about B2C, though, is the term. There’s nothing at all new about business-to-consumer transactions. Until about two years ago it was called “retailing”. Those who are experts in the field still call it that.

No matter how hard your business is, retailing is harder. Bank on it.

For example:

If you think your manufacturing company has an elaborate bill of materials, go visit a big-box retailer, and think about its inventory management. For “soft lines” (apparel and such), every SKU (“Stock Keeping Unit”) comes in multiple sizes and colors. A knit shirt, for example, may come in 6 sizes and 8 colors. That one shirt represents 48 separate items to track. How many different shirts can you find in a Target Greatland store or WalMart?

And where B2B selling propositions are rooted in the value they create, what do you have in retail? Fashion. Status. Convenience. The customer’s mood. Not to mention the all-important factors of store design and merchandising. And, of course, price.

“e-Tailing” was going to transform the whole business of selling to consumers, through the magic of Internet B2C. Too bad so many e-tailing experts knew nothing about retailing, because if they did, they’d have known there’s no such thing as on-line retailing.

When you sell on-line, as a retailer friend of mine pointed out more than a year ago, the shopper’s psychology has nothing to do with entering a store and everything to do with buying from a catalog. Catalog shoppers care more about convenience, less about physically interacting with merchandise, and not at all about the immediate gratification of coming home with the goods — the exact opposite of in-store shoppers, who see, touch, and often try on merchandise, and can wear it, hang it on the walls, or fix a leaky sink with it as soon as they get home.

That’s why the market estimates for on-line retailing are completely wrong, and always have been. The e-tailing industry is pretty much bounded by the number of catalog shoppers — a far smaller segment than retailing. And while the boundary isn’t fixed, it isn’t all that elastic either.

An e-tailer’s business processes are those of a cataloger as well. Where a retailer’s warehouse is designed for logistics — as an intermediate distribution point, shipping crates and pallets to stores — a cataloger’s warehouse is designed for fulfillment, or what’s known as “pick, pack and ship”. It’s a very different discipline. Having a warehouse doesn’t make you ready to offer customers on-line shopping carts.

And then there’s the little matter of returns, or “reverse logistics” for the fully buzzword compliant. Awhile back I suggested that Amazon.com’s success would depend on its opening physical stores. Returns are just one reason, but it’s an important one. Why? Take book-buying. You mail books back to Amazon.com for a refund — a pain in the neck for both of you. If you bought it at barnesandnoble.com, you’d drive to their nearest store, where you’d probably leave with more books than you returned.

You work for a B2B company. What does this have to do with you?

B2B companies have plenty to learn from retail. A good place to start is Paco Underhill’s highly readable book, Why We Buy. As you read it, I expect you’ll find lots of notions you can use in your own business.

Among those notions will be many examples of how limited a role IT has to play when a business meets its customers.

That’s a subject we’ll explore in more detail next week. Until then … go shopping. The economy needs you.

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“Machines don’t serve us, we serve them.”

This phrase was one of many repeated by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times from the Davos Conference recently. Normally a reasonable feller, I’m afraid Friedman got the point but missed its meaning.

The point? We’re on the verge of technology backlash. The irony of wireless technologies, designed to untether business professionals and executives from their desks, is that they increasingly tether these increasingly tense individuals to technology. Which is worse: Being tied to the inbox on your desk, or to your PDA, pager, cell phone and portable microwave?

At the Davos Conference, also known as the World Economic Forum, 1,000 of the world’s most influential people hear and discuss radically new ideas. Usually, a key focus is on what technology is going to do for us. Friedman reports that this year, participants worried more about what it’s doing to us. And that’s where the discussions missed the point.

What triggered a lot of this discussion is the need to be 24/7, always on, and always available so as not to be left behind. Many of the participants took this personally.

There’s no question that lots of business leaders and business-leader wannabes turn themselves into 24/7 always-on individuals. It is, to them, the price and burden of success, or so they say.

But is it, or is it simply a way to feel important? Keep in mind, these are the same people who complain about IT promoting technology for technology’s sake. Then they buy a WAP-enabled cell phone or sign up for wireless e-mail on their PDA, just because it’s available.

Friedman described a presentation by Microsoft researcher Linda Stone, who described a phenomenon she calls “continuous partial attention.” Most of us have been guilty of this at one time or another, reading our e-mail while talking to someone on the phone, and muting that conversation to answer our cell phones. Personal technologies are, of course, to blame.

Except, of course, that they aren’t. With apologies to Hamlet, the fault lies not in our technologies but in ourselves.

Continuous partial attention isn’t a new phenomenon. Back when the only personal information technology was the telephone, executives frequently accepted phone calls and scanned The Wall Street Journal while meeting with hapless supplicants. Technology may have democratized this form of bad manners, but it certainly didn’t invent it.

Another data point: I have, over the years, watched quite a few commuters reading their morning newspaper while driving during rush hour, and quite a few more putting on make-up. I much prefer those who talk on their cell phones — at least their eyes are pointed in the general direction of forward motion.

For those who think the new technologies require them to be available and alert at all times and in all situations, I offer the following: Didn’t you ever learn anything about the basic skills of management?

It’s quite true that increasingly, customers expect businesses to be available whenever they’re ready to buy something or need help with something they’ve already purchased. Except for banks (and someday they’ll figure it out, too), most businesses have found ways to accommodate this expectation, expanding availability by using automation, multiple shifts, and setting up operations in multiple time zones.

That’s whole businesses. Individuals who accommodate their need for extended availability by using personal technologies need to expand their repertoire. Among the alternatives: delegation, voice mail, e-mail, and not checking your messages until it’s convenient. Because while the number of situations that may require immediate attention may be very large, the number that require your immediate personal attention is very, very small. If that isn’t true — if you’re the only one who can deal with emergencies that may crop up at any moment — then there’s something very wrong with how you’ve organized your work.

The solution: Organize your work differently. And stop thinking you’re so essential to everything that you have to be continuously available.

Maybe, though, the problem really is with these new technologies. It may be that we need to make them more user friendly. In that spirit, here’s a suggestion to the designers of PDAs, cell phones, pagers, and everything else we carry around with us: Make the Off button bigger.

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