About marconomy

marconomy

marconomy is a German business-to-business media brand covering marketing and communications for the industrial and B2B sector. Published out of Würzburg in Bavaria, it operates as an online portal with accompanying print and newsletter formats and belongs to the Vogel Communications Group, one of Germany's largest specialist media houses for technical and industrial B2B audiences. The brand addresses marketing managers, communication professionals, and decision-makers in industry, IT, and trade who need to market complex products and services to professional buyers. Its editorial focus spans content marketing, lead generation, marketing automation, search engine marketing, and event marketing as they apply to industrial companies rather than consumer brands. In a German-language media landscape where general marketing publications concentrate on consumer goods, marconomy occupies a defined niche: the specialized discipline of marketing inside the machine builders, electronics firms, and process-technology companies of the Mittelstand.

Overview

marconomy presents itself as a cross-media information and communication platform for B2B marketing. The core of the brand is the news portal marconomy.de, which publishes daily articles, interviews, case studies, and analyses on marketing practice in industrial companies. Regular email newsletters carry the editorial content to a registered readership of marketing professionals, while print editions and special publications complement the digital offering. The brand also operates a congress and event line, including the B2B Marketing Kongress in Würzburg, where practitioners meet for keynotes, workshops, and exchange on topics such as social media in B2B, mobile marketing, lead management, and data protection in marketing practice.

The target audience is defined by function rather than by industry vertical: marketing directors, marketing managers, PR professionals, and managing directors of small and medium-sized industrial enterprises, as well as agencies and service providers that specialize in B2B communication. The editorial claim is practical usefulness — nutzwert in the tradition of German specialist publishing — rather than marketing theory. Articles examine how industrial companies generate leads at trade fairs, structure their content marketing, select marketing automation tools, or communicate with engineers and technical buyers, who make purchasing decisions differently from consumers.

The readership is concentrated in the German-speaking DACH region, which mirrors the footprint of its parent publisher. Editorial operations run from Würzburg, the historic headquarters of the Vogel publishing group, with the editorial team embedded in the publisher's broader RWS and marketing media activities. The Vogel group also maintains a Berlin office and additional locations across Germany, reflecting the geographic spread of its B2B media business.

History

The history of marconomy is inseparable from the history of its parent company. The Vogel publishing house was founded in 1891 by Carl Gustav Vogel in Pößneck, Thuringia, and established its headquarters in Würzburg in 1952. Over the decades it grew into one of Germany's leading publishers of specialist information, with a portfolio that came to include roughly one hundred specialist magazines and dozens of websites serving industry, automotive, information technology, and the legal and tax professions.

As print specialist publishing faced structural change from the mid-2000s, Vogel redirected its strategy toward digital services and holistic B2B communication. From 2005 the company intensified its digitalization efforts, and in 2006 it opened the Vogel Convention Center in the repurposed former production premises in Würzburg, creating a physical venue for the congress and event business that today supports brands such as marconomy. The Vogel Future Group was set up to develop digital business models, and the company repositioned itself as a full-service provider of B2B communication rather than a pure publisher.

The marconomy brand emerged within this transformation as the group's dedicated editorial platform for marketing communication in B2B. On 1 June 2018 the company renamed itself from Vogel Business Media to Vogel Communications Group GmbH & Co. KG, a change that formally expressed the shift from media publishing toward integrated communication services. marconomy has since operated as one of the group's marketing-oriented editorial brands alongside its industry and IT titles, addressing the growing professionalization of marketing departments inside industrial companies.

Coverage and Content

The editorial coverage of marconomy centers on the marketing disciplines that matter to industrial and B2B companies. Core topic areas include content marketing and storytelling for technical products, lead management and lead generation, marketing automation and customer relationship systems, search engine optimization and search advertising, social media strategy in B2B contexts, and trade fair marketing, which remains one of the most important communication channels for German industrial firms. Event marketing, sponsorship, and corporate publishing are further standing topics.

A second strand of coverage concerns the organizational side of marketing: how industrial companies build marketing teams, brief agencies, measure marketing performance, and align marketing with sales in long and complex buying processes. Interviews with marketing directors of Mittelstand companies, reports on award-winning B2B campaigns, and analyses of technology trends — from augmented reality in product presentation to data protection requirements in marketing practice — round out the mix. The annual B2B Marketing Kongress in Würzburg extends the editorial program into a physical format with keynote lectures, practical workshops, and discussion panels, topics in past editions having included mobile marketing, social media monitoring, and content marketing practice.

The tone of the content is practice-oriented and German-language. Rather than academic marketing theory, articles and case studies describe how companies of comparable size and structure solve concrete problems — a format that reflects the conventions of German Fachpresse, where the usefulness of specialist information for the reader's daily work is the central quality criterion.

Organization and Ownership

marconomy is published by the Vogel Communications Group GmbH & Co. KG, headquartered in Würzburg. The group describes itself as one of Germany's leading providers of specialist communication, with activities concentrated on German-speaking markets and seven additional locations in Germany beyond the Würzburg headquarters. Since January 2019 the management board has been chaired by Matthias Bauer as CEO, with Günter Schürger as COO. The group employs between 500 and 1,000 people.

Within the group, marconomy belongs to the marketing-oriented part of the portfolio. The publisher's sales organization, operating under the businessAD brand, markets the group's media across clusters that include industry, automotive, electronics, chemicals and pharma, and RWS and marketing — the latter being the commercial home of the marconomy brand. The editors of the group's specialist media prepare trade and industry topics in a journalistically professional manner for readers, users, and event attendees, with high-quality knowledge transfer as the stated standard.

Precise circulation figures or registered-newsletter subscriber counts for marconomy are not publicly confirmed in available sources; the publisher's media data for individual titles is distributed to advertising customers on request. The brand's commercial model follows the standard B2B media pattern of the group: advertising and content-marketing formats in print and online, event sponsorships, and service offerings around lead generation and corporate communication.

Digital Presence

The digital centerpiece of the brand is the portal marconomy.de, which serves as the news hub, article archive, and registration point for newsletters. The site publishes editorial content on a rolling basis and structures it by topic channels that mirror the marketing disciplines covered in print. Email newsletters distribute selected content to subscribers and serve as one of the brand's main reach channels among marketing professionals.

Beyond the website, marconomy maintains a presence on professional social networks where its target audience of marketing practitioners is active, using these channels to distribute articles, promote the B2B Marketing Kongress, and engage with the B2B marketing community. The congress itself has generated secondary coverage in the marketing trade press, extending the brand's visibility beyond its own channels.

The brand's digital formats sit within the Vogel group's broader digital infrastructure, which includes dozens of specialist websites and the group's content-marketing and lead-generation services. This integration allows marconomy to combine editorial content with the group's event, data, and service offerings, positioning the brand not merely as a magazine but as a platform for B2B marketing communication in the German-speaking industrial economy.