The buying centre

Frederick E. Webster Jr & Yoram Wind · 1972

Also known as The decision making unit, DMU

An organisational purchase is made by a group of people holding different roles, not by a buyer.

Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Audience

What it does

It names the roles that appear in an organisational purchase — the user, the influencer, the buyer, the decider, the gatekeeper — and observes that they are held by different people with different concerns, frequently in different departments and sometimes in different companies. The practical consequence is that one argument cannot win the decision: the case that persuades the user is not the case that satisfies the approver, and the role most often unaddressed is the one that can stop it.

Reach for it when: Whenever a sale involves more than one person, and particularly where the person who uses the product has no budget and the person with budget will never use it.
Where it stops: The roles are a vocabulary rather than a map. Who holds which role varies by organisation and by purchase, and the model cannot tell you — it can only stop you assuming there is one person to convince.

Frederick E. Webster Jr & Yoram Wind, Organizational Buying Behavior, Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Why it sits at Audience

Everyone the organisation could serve, and who among them it actually addresses: how they divide into segments, what one of them is like up close, what each is worth, and where they can be found.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

SegmentsThe segmentation–targeting–positioning sequence, and the criteria that a segment be measurable, substantial, accessible and actionable.
PersonasBuyer-persona research practice, and the critique of internally generated personas as projections of the team.
Segment valueCustomer lifetime value against acquisition cost, applied at segment rather than aggregate level.
Where they areMedia and channel research on reach and accessibility as a segmentation criterion in its own right.

All of Audience

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Audience lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Business CoreWhat the audience is trying to get done is analysed in the value proposition; this object settles who and where.
Brand CorePositioning is aimed at a segment, and a position for everyone is aimed at nobody.
Marketing ChannelsWhere the audience is determines which channels are even available.
Customer JourneyWhere they are is a standing fact about them; the journey is a sequence they move through. If the sentence would still be true in a year when nobody buys anything, it belongs here.
Data CoreSegment value requires the acquisition and retention data to be held at segment level.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Audience too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

Segmentation, targeting, positioningDivide the market, choose deliberately which parts to serve, then decide what you will mean to them.
PersonasA small number of specific, named, fictional people standing in for real patterns of behaviour.

Elsewhere in Market Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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