Business marketing is a marketing practice of individuals or organizations (including commercial businesses, governments, and institutions). It allows them to sell products or services to other companies or organizations that resell them, use them in their products or services, or use them to support their works. It is a way to promote business and improve profit too. Business marketing is also known as industrial marketing or business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Business-to-government marketing, while still classified within the B2B discipline due to the sharing of dynamics, does differ slightly. Origins The practice of a purveyor of goods trading with another may be as old as commerce itself. In relation to marketing today, its history is more recent. Michael Morris, Leyland Pitt, and Earl Dwight Honeycutt say that for several years business marketing took "a back seat" to consumer marketing. This entailed providers of goods or services selling directly to households through mass media and retail channels. David Lichtenthal (professor of marketing at Zicklin School of Business) notes in his research that business marketing has existed since the mid-19th century. He adds that the bulk of research on business marketing has come in the last 25 years. This began to change in the middle to late 1970s. Academic periodicals, including the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing and the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing now publish studies on the subject regularly. Professional conferences on business marketing are held every year and courses are commonplace at many universities today. According to Jeremy Kourdi, more than half of marketing majors start their careers in business marketing rather than consumer marketing. Internal and external efficiency The internal efficiency of a business entity is the factor by which it prepares a product or service in a cost efficient manner. The external efficiency of a business entity is the factor by which it effectively markets itself so as to utilise the market, in order to retrieve maximum profits from that internal efficiency. So in a b2b market setting, the external efficiencies of the business entities due to conduct trade is vital to the success of the b2b transaction, especially if they belong to the same concern, in which case an internal market between the co-owned business entities is emergent. Being able to make use of external economies of scale within the same ownership group is actually one of the motivations for creating a concern. Business and consumer markets (B2C)