Company Visits BBS return
A valuable added Value, to be rediscovered together

14 June 2022

With the visit to Salvagnini, a leading company in the field of machine tools for sheet metal working, company visits started again for the Executive Masters. Company visits are particularly important moments in the training of professionals at BBS because they allow them to experience firsthand excellent realities in different fields of study, thoroughly analyzing their vision, strategies and tools. In Salvagnini, an Italian company that has become a global benchmark, participants in the BBS Executive Master’s in Sales and Marketing had the opportunity to explore an innovative company, but one with nearly 60 years of history behind it. 

The visit consisted of two pivotal moments. The first featured two key people from the company, such as Paola Grigolato, Training & Development Specialist, who presented the company’s vision and history, and Tommaso Bonuzzi, Head of Project & Marketing, who delved into the company’s strategy in the international arena. In the second part of the day, there was an interesting tour of the Sarego (VI) plant that ended with a special lecture by Professor Fabio Ancarani, Scientific Director of the Master’s program.

Ancarani’s lecture, focused on the new Human to Human Marketing, was in some ways a further deepening of the experience the participants had during the company visit. Indeed, Ancarani’s talk highlighted even more the importance of experiencing up close company realities like Salvagnini, which are made of cutting-edge tools and technologies, but which, first and foremost, are made of people ready to put their talents on the line in a market made of other people.

Ancarani, tracing the stages of marketing in the long journey from the traditional B2B / B2C distinction to the contemporary H2H, recalled that even before this latest evolution, there was the so-called B2B2C, “business to business to consumer marketing, which looks at the end customer even in the relationship between businesses, as well as BTP or Business To People, which overcomes the distinction between consumers and business to recognize that there are actually similarities and that even in corporate purchasing departments, the buyer is not an impersonal entity, but a person with motivations, risk perceptions and preferences.” 

In a context where people are returning to the center, the needs for interconnection and simplification, as well as those related to protecting the environment in which we live, become equally central. And so if it is important to take individuals into account, it is also important to take into account two extraordinarily topical issues, which Human 2 Human Marketing, born from an insight of the internationally renowned guru Philip Kotler, does not ignore, but integrates and enhances in its deepest essence: technology and sustainability. Equally important, Ancarani explains and Kotler writes with colleagues Waldemar Pfoertsch and Uwe Sponholz, are the design thinking approach and digitalization.

 

Ancarani also opened an engaging discussion with students on the topic of content: in a context where technology enables people to engage with brands and companies, it becomes critical to producing content that is useful and interesting to the people that brands and companies want to reach. It seems obvious in the age of social media, yet, what happens is that we often don’t really know the people we want to reach, so much so that we intercept them, even today, in the wrong ways and at the wrong times. “Kotler’s Human to Human idea is that marketing must become Inbound only: that is, users, reached by the content, can’t wait to reach out and get involved with the company,” Ancarani explains. Here then is where technology becomes valuable support, but one must know how to use it in the best possible way. Same goes for data, whose importance, a linchpin of corporate culture, lies not so much in collecting and managing it, but in interpreting it and using it to build a valid inboud strategy. 

In short, the BBS company visits, an activity that has always been at the heart of the School, could not have resumed in a better and more exciting way. Many thanks to the partner companies that collaborate with Bologna Business School making possible these important moments of training, comparison and individual and collective growth.