Chapter 5
Branding in the B2B World—New Opportunities
Most business people traditionally feel that B2B (business-to-business) is a vastly different world from B2C (business-to-consumer), and their respective business development and marketing practices have nothing in common. This assumption is no longer true. The digital revolution has broadened the scope of resources and tactics used in both worlds and has added intense pressure on B2B marketers to become more customerfocused, competitive, and innovative.
A good example of how social media has affected B2B is illustrated from the recent experience of Patricia Martin, a noted author as well as CEO and founder of LitLamp Communications. She attended the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2012, a huge trade show that serves as “an incubator of cutting-edge technologies.” She observed how the incidence and use of social medial had exploded this annual festival in size. In particular, she noted in her March 20, 2012, blog that “B2B brands, especially start-ups, are starting to look more like consumer brands. They have bright, engaging identities and strong brand narratives.” Her insight from this experience was that “strong branding of B2B start-ups helps them sell into big and middle market businesses that sign up for the solution, but say ‘yes’ for the cachet of affiliating with a cool, social media savvy start-up. Furthermore, venture money has been trained to appreciate branding after a decade of betting on consumer focused start-ups.” What does this mean? In Patricia's opinion, the opportunity will be that “B2B investors will start to pay for better branding.”
Consumer marketing in B2C has long been recognized for its progressive advancements in market research and segmentation, competitive positioning, strategic brand building, innovative marketing practices, and creative thinking. Despite several differences in the marketing and sales dynamics between B2B and B2C, more forward-thinking B2B companies are beginning to discover and adapt many of the basic B2C principles to improve their marketing effectiveness. Here are five opportunity areas for creating more powerful B2B brands and improving marketing efficiencies.
1. Building Strong Customer Loyalty
Any conversation on adapting B2C marketing principles will raise the issue of how the B2B customer is so different. The immediate inference is that sophisticated B2C marketing is not relevant or helpful for any B2B company trying to improve the effectiveness of its marketing team because of this.
The idea that B2C primarily involves mass marketing is no longer true. Our society has become highly fragmented. Media technology and the internet have enabled greater focus, reach, and customization of our marketing efforts to appeal to specific segments in the market, each with different characteristics and needs.
Yet marketing to the typical customer in a B2B situation remains unique in many ways—fewer customers, more complicated decision making, higher, more diverse pricing, greater pressure internally on the buyer to justify his/her purchase decision, longer lead times for the purchase, and greater scrutiny of the product offer. These customer differences sustain the unfortunate, cavalier belief by many that B2B marketing still cannot learn from B2C marketing.
The underlying need to more deeply understand the target customer, especially to achieve a meaningful brand positioning and more innovative marketing initiatives is, in fact, more critical for B2B endeavors, because of the following important differences:
• More Multileveled Purchasing Decision: The task of comprehensively examining and approving a purchase in B2B situations is anything but spontaneous. Many people get involved, a variety of different and sometimes conflicting criteria are common, and often an attitude of parochial thinking by the customer (e.g., “only we really understand our business ...”) can become an enormous challenge for the B2B marketer (and sales person). The answer simply requires a more concerted effort to learn everything possible about the customers, who are the people involved in the decision-making process (including the influencers), procedures, and special insights behind the purchase decision, the main business drivers for your customer's success, and importantly how to build a connection of trust and comfort with the buyer.
• The B2B Company Operates in a More Complex World: The discipline of segmenting the market to identify and prioritize the ideal target customers can be even more crucial for B2B marketing because it forces one to better understand the customer's needs, issues, and the specific context for decision making in his/her immediate business category (e.g., who their competition is, how different they are, how/why a product offer can be better customized). This intense evaluation will ultimately facilitate a more constructive dialog with the customer and create a convincing knowledge base that would impress him/her and foster a more respectful, loyal relationship.
• Offering More than Product Expertise: Most B2B companies, especially in hi-tech industries, tend to be relentlessly product focused, not brand or customer oriented. Yes, their products (and markets) are more complicated, and so the resulting emphasis is on what these products do. However, not enough attention is focused on what these products or services can do for the customer, and especially how the customer should feel about an offer. In particular, B2B sales people have a tendency to focus only on the features of a product, not the benefits. I recently conducted a “mini ideation workshop” for 75 sales people from a leading paint company, where I emphasized the differences between features and benefits. When the audience described their most creative, relevant new ideas, not one person included what the offer would do for the customer, that is, the benefit. True product differentiation is scant in the B2C world, which forces marketers to rely more on special brand positioning to create a strategic leverage and a high-value perception. The B2B marketers can improve their effectiveness by similarly adding an emotional element to their value proposition, one that is based on customer insights and resonates with the actual user experience.
A good example of a B2B company that has transitioned to a more user-sensitive marketing approach is Microsoft. Long known for its difficult-to-understand, over engineered Windows programs (e.g., Vista), it has since rebounded with a more simplified and personalized brand positioning aimed to build more meaningful relationships with their customers. Their “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was My Idea” campaign reflects this new positioning, which has become the fastest selling operating system in history.
Charles Gold, an experienced tech marketer for over 20 years, recently wrote in an article “Getting Sophisticated: What B2B Tech Marketers Must Learn from B2C” 1 that tech marketers are relatively unsophisticated and rely on blunt instruments, not precision tools. A key driver for this essential transition is the emergence of the younger “Z” Generation that has grown up with expectations about products based on “elegant user experiences”—plain spoken communications and pervasive social networks. And these younger, savvy, and demanding people will also be tomorrow's B2B customer.
Marketing for both B2B and B2C should always start with the target customer, but there is still ample room for improvement in the B2B world by studying and adapting other approaches to strengthen customer loyalty.
2. A More Compelling Value Proposition
Another opportunity for B2B marketers to learn from B2C practices is researching and improving their “Value Proposition.” This concept has always been a predominant strategic tool for marketing in B2C categories, and is now becoming more ubiquitous in B2B industries. What has driven the importance of this principle recently is the recession and how customers today view and judge “good value.” Their biggest concern for the future lies overwhelmingly in the economy. This macroeconomic reality is impacting the behavior of all decision makers, in two critical ways: (1) a reduction in consumption in many categories (e.g., entertainment), delay of major purchases (e.g., home improvements), and/or resorting to cheaper products; and (2) for more essential goods and services, people will trade down to stretch their money, demonstrating higher price sensitivity and decreased usage.
Everyone is simply more sensitive to what they will be getting for their money or the price they pay. The underlying concept of “value” in this context of a value proposition is based on a basic formula:
The term “proposition” implies a promise of value, or what can be offered and delivered to the customer to enhance the product/company brand equity (e.g., essentially the perceived value of the brand) and customer loyalty. While there are many definitions of “value proposition,” the one I prefer is more customer driven and very appropriate for B2B companies:
It is a clear statement about the tangible business results customers can get from using your product, service or solution. Busy decision-makers don't care about what you're selling. They only care about what it does for them. 2
In other words, a value proposition defines the primary reason why a customer or prospect should buy from you and not the competition. A company must find a relevant and credible way to differentiate its offer from competitors, and ideally identify at least one key element of value where they need to excel. This is the ultimate challenge for any brand positioning.
Importance of Being Customer Focused
A good value proposition must be customer driven, not based solely on a product's attributes. In his book Building Strong Brands, 3 David Aaker refers to the “Product-Attribute Fixation Trap,” in which the strategic and tactical management of a brand is focused on product attributes. The assumption here is that these attributes are the only relevant bases for customer decisions and competitive dynamics.
This is a common challenge for technology companies in particular that are obsessed with the intricacies of the product's functional performance. The key is to focus more on the reasons why your customer could use your offering, or what they really care about when making decisions. Understanding the formulaic definition of value will help. A concerted effort to diligently research customers will help identify new insights and ways to enhance the perceived benefit or solution. This will enable B2B marketers to then establish an optimal price that will accurately reflect the relevance and importance of the perceived quality of this benefit.
What to Ask Yourself (and Customers) to Identify Opportunities for Improvement
When developing the value proposition to maximize the perceived value of your offering, here are some useful questions that we ask B2B clients internally and/or customers in research:
• Why do people buy from our company in the first place? What value do they seek? Expect? Hope for?
• What are we doing to meet their expectations? What are we not doing?
• What are the customer's true “pain points” or problems?
• What is our “niche/specialization” or area of excellence? Do customers recognize this?
• How do customers actually think and talk about our business? What must they be convinced of to start buying from my company?
• What can I change or add to my value proposition to cause my customers to say, “I would have to be crazy to do business with someone else?”
How to Overcome Typical Pricing Issues to Enhance Your Value Proposition
Solutions must begin with smart research that diagnoses the reasons behind frequent customer complaints, especially those threats that can adversely impact the balance between the perceived benefit and the price. Following are the examples of common problems and possible solutions:
1. “The superior benefit is not worth the price premium”
a.Add or enhance an emotional element to the end benefit
b.Leverage the price as a signal of quality
c.Create new copy to elevate the perceived worth
2.“I already have the same benefit with my cheaper choice”
a.Question the cheaper option to shake the customer's complacency
b.Focus on your superiority, perhaps with a credible endorsement
c.Offer an extra reason to support the benefit and to buy it
3.“I can't afford it, it is way too expensive for me”
a.Reframe the absolute price (e.g., change the unit of measure or perceived price point)
b.Emphasize any side savings
c.Highlight the risks of not buying it
4.“Sure it's cheap, but I doubt the quality”
a.Reassure the customer on the quality (e.g., leverage product strengths, brand history, or special ingredients/components)
b.Use others to sell the quality (e.g., a spokesperson who epitomizes value, or how everyone else thinks it's high quality)
Creating a relevant and credible value proposition will be meaningful only if it is consistently used to guide all marketing and sales initiatives, from phone calls, emails, voice mails to advertising and actual presentations to customers. The concept of optimizing value is too important for your success to treat lightly when defining the ideal value proposition. I suggest you address three fundamental questions (and typical answers), which will help you determine whether your current value proposition needs improvement:
1. Have the market conditions, including competition, changed enough during the past 3 years so that your value proposition warrants a new review?
a.Yes, so you should consider whether/how to strengthen it
b.Not sure, but it makes sense to re-assess these market dynamics to validate it
c.No, I am positive my value proposition is still solid and relevant (if this is your answer, there may be a risk in this assumption)
2. Do your primary customers recognize, appreciate, and are still motivated by the promise in your value proposition?
a.Yes, because we get feedback from them all the time that confirms its viability
b.Not sure, because we don't spend enough time or resources getting objective, comprehensive feedback
c.No, doubt it, because we have been getting mixed signals and more pressure on our pricing from them
3.Do your marketing and sales teams consistently and convincingly communicate the same message, based on your current value proposition?
a.Yes, at least that is what my senior managers convey to me
b.Not sure, as we don't always monitor their messages carefully
c.No, don't think so because the coordination and communications between our marketing and sales personnel can be improved
3. How Value Pricing Can Prevent Perceptions of “Commoditization”
The digital revolution has transformed business models in many ways, especially this preoccupation of “best value,” and related to this is the ease for anyone comparing prices online for similar products or services. A recent survey by IBM 4 among 1,730 CMOs around the world underscored the perplexing effects of accessible data on this search for “best value.” The survey results show that the biggest challenges CMOs face today are driven by this new digital age:
1.Data explosion (71%)
2.Social media (68%)
3.Growth of channel and device choices (65%)
With the internet, people can easily learn more about the cost of any product or service these days. An increasingly common challenge for B2B companies is to combat the tendency of buyers from applying intense pressure to lower their prices. It is basically a fight against “commoditization.” When there is little convincing difference from competition (i.e., including a perception of lower quality), purchasers will exert their influence to drive this commoditization. After all, squeezing down the price is often how they are judged and rewarded, and the only rational way to differentiate commodities is the price, which favors the buyer, not the seller. And often the purchaser has a good idea of the seller's cost these days.
The full impact of this data explosion has even affected sales at retail. A recent article in The New York Times, “Knowing Cost, the Customer Sets the Price,” 5 described how the shopper can today haggle down prices due to the internet and shopping comparison apps. If the retailer balks, some shoppers will walk, going to Amazon and eBay instead.
How to Fight Commoditization with Value Pricing
B2B marketers can learn a lot from B2C on how to enhance the perceived value of their products or services. Instead of being overly focused on product details and capabilities, as so many B2B marketers and sales people are, they should become more customer focused and learn what more can be done to satisfy their needs, even delight them. The insights from a more intense scrutiny of the customer will become the basis for more creative, prudent, and relevant value pricing.
Wikipedia defines value pricing (or really “value-based pricing”) as a “business strategy that sets prices primarily on the perceived value to the customer, rather than on the actual cost of the product, the market price, competitor's prices, or the historical price.” 6 In both B2C and B2B, the perception of value is based on how the customer views the benefit or solution offered—its quality, worthiness, distinctiveness, and relevance to the customer's needs, plus how they feel emotionally about it. The goal of value pricing should be to align the price with this perceived value (i.e., the benefit, ideally with an indication of the quantitative measurement of its impact) promised and delivered to the customer.
This IBM survey also found that the most proactive CMOs are responding to these digital challenges by trying to understand the customers as individuals, not as markets. They are focusing on relationships (the basis for successful branding), not transactions. This includes a commitment to developing a more clear “corporate brand character” as well.
The vast majority of CMOs in this survey identified three key areas for improvement, which will all help marketers and sales people fight this problem of commoditization:
1. Deliver Value to Empowered Customers: B2B marketers must not only learn what customers need or want, but also identify individual insights on what they value most and how they behave. This will be accomplished by going beyond traditional research, too. Approximately 80% of the CMOs said they plan to use customer analytics, CRM or customer relationship management, social media, and mobile apps more extensively to identify these underlying insights and “hidden wishes.”
2. Foster Lasting Connections: In today's age of digital technology, it is easy for customers to learn about the seller and competitive offers, and then go elsewhere. This is why a top priority is to cultivate strong customer loyalty. In B2B, this includes building the corporate character or brand image, for both external customers and internal employees, and across all touch points and experiences. Today, what an organization stands for is as important as what it sells. Approximately 75% of these CMOs believe marketing must manage brand reputation within and beyond the enterprise.
3. Capture Value, Measure Results: There is increasing pressure to justify marketing expenditures and maximize the return on marketing investment. A disconcerting trend, especially in B2B circles, is a disproportionate emphasis on selling tactics and using data to manage the transaction, not on sustaining the relationship with the customer. Of the four Ps (promotion, products, place, and price), CMOs feel they should play a greater role shaping the latter three Ps. This will help marketers develop more meaningful, customized programs, offers, and special services to enhance the perception of the “benefit/solution” promised, and thus improve their value pricing effectiveness.
Customers will continue to become more proficient in learning about a seller's costs and competitive alternatives. The real challenge for B2B marketers is to improve their research to better understand individual buyers’ value desires and behavior, to be more innovative by creating new ideas for a better offer, and to allocate more resources for managing their relationship with buyers going forward.
4. Marketing and Sales Alignment—Breaking Down Silos
The phenomenon of silo mentality has become a major problem today. In many companies it causes a dangerous disconnect between marketing and sales, especially in B2B where the sales role has traditionally predominated (marketing is more proactive in B2C companies, and so the problem is not usually severe). The result is lost opportunities and revenues, increased market entry costs, longer sales cycles, wasted marketing materials, and overall higher cost of sales. Consider the following alarming signs of inefficiencies:
• Approximately 80% of marketing leads in B2B are lost or ignored by sales today
• Approximately 70% of marketing collateral is never used by sales
• Most ignored leads are for the long term, which can represent 77% of potential company revenues
Source: Marketing Sherpa
Both sales and marketing end up pointing blameful fingers at each other. Silos may exist in other functional departments too (e.g., PR, HR, IT Operations), but this lack of integration or alignment between sales and marketing is probably the most ubiquitous issue that is haunting many CEOs today. Years ago, Peter Drucker said “Sales and marketing functions can never align; they are opposing functions, not parallel ones.” However, business has changed dramatically since then. Technological advancements, more aggressive competition, tighter budgets, and intensifying pressure to measure performance have forced CEOs to finally acknowledge these inefficiencies and to develop new solutions.
One of the problems leading to this silo mentality is that the roles of marketing and sales have become blurred in many B2B companies. An executive at a major health care company recently said that most of their marketing services are outsourced now, including traditional strategic initiatives such as brand positioning, business plan development, all public relations, creative input for packaging and advertising, competitive analyses, and most promotional initiatives. At the same time, sales has expanded its functions to control almost every other aspect of traditional marketing and customer servicing.
There are several drivers behind this emergence of silo behavior. One of the most important causes is the recent recession and the pressures on achieving key business results. Tightening one's belt has forced marketing to become more careful about budgeting and justifying all initiatives, including measuring the outcome, which has created intense pressure for procuring enough funds and defending their actions. By contrast, declining demand has made it very difficult for sales to find new buyers, and so their focus is more on controlling interaction with their current customers.
Another key factor is the explosion of digital access and social media platforms. This offers marketing new low-cost opportunities to interact directly with customers and track their success, even converting identified leads to customers (generally a sales function). Meanwhile, sales is using these digital vehicles to gain more insights on the customer's buying behavior and a better understanding of the influencer network (i.e., usually the domain of marketing).
These merging roles beg the question of what should be the responsibilities and expectations for both the marketing and sales roles today. Traditionally, the role of marketing has been more strategic, while sales is more tactical—marketing generates the demand and leads, and sales closes the deal. Marketing people care about the brand. Sales people care about the deal.
One of the key sources of these conflicts is that the brand value proposition and rationale are not translated down to sales in a practical, specific, or actionable way. People in sales get frustrated when marketing provides them with too much communication about the brand, but it is not broken down into tactical arguments, selling points, or concise programs. As a result, sales people often view marketing people in an “ivory tower” way. Sales people have very little time in front of clients and prospects. A 5-minute presentation on the brand will take a back seat to more immediate pitches on the price and key features of the product. In short, the brand messages should be customized to fit the realities of the sales world. If not, those pretty brand brochures will continue to collect dust.
How to Eliminate These Silos
The first task for senior management is to recognize this phenomenon and the causes behind it, especially how the roles of each may have merged. Then here are some specific steps that would help integrate the marketing and sales functions to minimize overlap and more effectively grow a business:
1. Make it a Top Priority—with Bite: Senior management should re-structure these roles with new job descriptions, special bonuses for achieving a more productive alignment, and create an ongoing mechanism for more open, frequent discussions between marketing and sales. Ideally, both marketing and sales should report to one director or EVP. In addition, a staff person reporting to this head should be responsible for all sales and marketing communications.
2. Create a Special “Integration Team”: Assign one key person from marketing and sales (plus other disciplines, as necessary, such as HR, IT) to establish common business goals, break down the silos, and conduct meetings at least every other week to discuss upcoming activities and review the dashboard that everyone reports into, and also to frequently report the progress to senior leadership.
3. Initiate “Change Management”: The process of generating and converting leads is crucial and it must be clearly spelled out who does what between marketing and sales. This may require extreme measures to ensure the follow-up details are well coordinated and monitored by senior management. The CEO must create a new environment where common goals are understood and achieved as a team.
Eliminating this silo mentality will require a concerted, ongoing effort as it will involve some fundamental cultural changes. People must no longer treat marketing and sales as departments but as groups of individuals, motivating each person with high potential to contribute toward a common goal of creating added value for the customer. Ideally, marketing should take the time to see how the sales team operates on a daily basis so that they can make selling easier, more efficient, and more effective. Sometimes bringing in outside, neutral expertise can help bridge this gap. Global Partners, a consulting and training firm from Cambridge, Massachusetts, focuses on B2B issues like this.
5. Why Emotion Is Critical for B2B Brand Marketing
Another subtle yet crucial opportunity involves adding emotion to a company's marketing and sales approach. While B2B must improve its ability to enhance the perceived value of its offers, how to incorporate a relevant emotional dynamic in its brand positioning and initiatives may be the most challenging for many traditional B2B marketers.
There are many noteworthy differences between B2B and B2C marketing that help explain why the B2B approach is traditionally more rational—for example, with longer sales cycles, more complex, fewer buyers, price variations for different buyers or situations, purchasing prospects conducting more research, more people involved in the decision process, personal interactions being more important, and greater influence by third parties. The typical B2B process starts with an explanation of what the product or service offers, then how it works, and finally why it makes sense for the prospect and his/her company. It is the classic what–how–why approach, with the hope that ultimately this process will engender a sense of trust with the buyer. The emphasis is always on a rational, formulaic evaluation, with little or no emotion included, even though building one-to-one personal relationships is more common, pronounced, and critical in B2B.
Meanwhile, the intense competitive nature and the sophistication of branding in the B2C world has elevated marketing beyond the rational and forced a greater emotional involvement. Brand marketing is all about building a trustful relationship with a customer. Much of B2C advertising is impulse or experience oriented, frequently designed to convince customers to “want” something, rather than pandering to a “need” for a product that is more likely in B2B. Apple is a great example. No one “needed” an iPad or iPhone until Apple created a contagious, passionate desire for these new products, contributed by the customer's ubiquitous emotional love for Apple, cultivated over time. In addition, the Apple brand became very “cool” and people simply wanted that emotional “halo” and image to extend to themselves.
The Growing Importance of “Brand Trust”
There is no emotional driver more important for building a sustained relationship with target customers than the feeling of trust. So many variables are at play for determining the trust for a brand—confidence, integrity, reliability, credibility, the level of certainty, etc. The annual Edelman Trust Index survey shows that the level of trust for brands and business leaders has declined significantly in recent years. While the economic and pricing values for B2B decision making will always be vital, the increasing complexity of their buying process has caused the subjective value of trust to become even more crucial.
This growing lack of trust is particularly evident among the emerging millennial segment (those born after 1980). A recent survey of 400 millennials by a marketing consulting firm, Social Chorus, showed a serious distrust level for brand advertising—only 6% consider online advertising to be credible (probably worse for traditional advertising), whereas feedback from their peers is the most influential for their purchase decisions (95% say their friends are the most credible source of information). A sense of trust for this emerging powerhouse group is essential: 92% say “trust” plays a key role on who influences them online.
Another area where brand trust is becoming more critical is cross-cultural relationships. Every foreign market has different business practices and a unique culture, so it is natural to be suspicious and distrustful of any new venture from the outside. Companies must recognize these barriers, and working with local managers, conduct insightful research to better understand their special emotional drivers and create new ideas for relevant marketing initiatives that would appeal to their cultural passions.
The intangible value of a brand trust and/or a company reputation is a significant contributor of a company's valuation as well. Other sources of intangible value are a company or brand's market position, its business systems (proprietary software, processes, etc.) and its knowledge (R&D, patents, human capital, etc.). In their book The Brand Bubble, John Gerzema and Edward Lebar estimate that in the 1950s about 30% of a firm's value was intangible. Today, it is closer to 62% globally.
Creating value is no longer just about the quality of a product or service. Today, it is also about the quality of a company's conduct, both internally and externally. There is greater transparency with the internet these days, so any trust deficit will act as a deterrent to a firm's long-term growth. Six of the world's top ten brands from Interbrand's global surveys are technology companies: Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and HP. Something they all have in common is the unprecedented amount of personal data that is entrusted to them. As a result, they are committed to forging deep emotional connections with consumers, especially trust.
Trust and brand leadership are a function of the many quiet decisions and judgment calls that a company’s management makes about its own values. In a 2011 article “Why Trust Matters More Than Ever for Brands” in the Harvard Business Review, Deepa Prahalad offers some helpful examples of how reputable companies have taken the initiative to secure this sense of trust in their corporate brand: “Apple saying that it will not accept apps for pornography, SC Johnson going beyond the industry standard to be more transparent about the ingredients in its products, the Tata Group retaining every single employee and hotel contractor after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.”
Brand trust is also essential in B2C, especially with the explosion of social media marketing. Mark Fidelman, CEO for Evolve, an influencer engagement and marketing consulting firm, alluded to the results of their recent survey to reinforce the importance of trust: 73% of consumers base their buying decision on “trust”, more than any other emotion. The key ingredients for developing a healthy level of trust include credibility, reliability, and intimacy (i.e., comfort in a brand).
According to Fidelman, every consumer naturally has their own “community of trust,” consisting primarily of family and friends. In addition, the internet has created such an extensive interactive communication network that has allowed for trustworthy, independent “influencers” and “brand advocates” to emerge in various categories. They have also become credible members of this community of trust and can play a significant role in word-of-mouth sharing or marketing. Using the simple “AIDA” model, influencers have an impact on the “awareness” and “interest” phases, whereas advocates are most convincing for encouraging the “desire” and “action” for buying decisions. Mark Fidelman underscores the importance of identifying and working with such brand influencers and advocates building a sense of trust for such purchases and enhancing brand loyalty over the long run.
Creating a more trustful relationship is not easy, but developing a relevant and appealing brand persona is essential. Whether it involves an idealistic emerging segment like millennials, or an increasingly complicated decision-making process in B2B, or a dynamic, transformative category like healthcare, the brand content must include new, meaningful trust-building ideas. The rise of “purposeful branding” reflects a trend that is becoming more prevalent, especially for millennials. The Social Chorus survey indicated that millennials strongly favor credible content that embraces new social responsibility and environmental deeds. Internationally, the growing visibility and active response to indigenous corruption in many parts of the world (e.g., Brazil, China, India, Russia, plus the worldwide financial and banking industry) is making this notion of brand trust even more important.
Related to this, Erich Joachimsthaler, founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, recently inaugurated a survey among 1000 business leaders on the perceived value and health of over 60 brands. The results determined a new value ranking for each, a “Brand Social Currency” score, another indication of the “brand trust” for these companies. Among the most trusted brands were JetBlue, Virgin, and Southwest in the airline category, Starbucks in the fast food area, and not surprisingly, Apple.
How to Add Emotions in B2B Marketing
The opportunity to make the “why” argument so much more convincing with relevant emotions is compelling. In B2B, human relationships are more personally interactive and important, and so emotions such as trust, confidence, fear avoidance, and caring are powerful ingredients for cultivating a stronger relationship. In his classic instructional video, Simon Sinek talks about “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” 7 and how the “why” you believe is more important than the “what” you do. Sinek uses Apple, The Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King to demonstrate powerful emotions such as believing and loyalty.
Here are some specific steps that can enhance the value of a B2B proposition, through the addition of an emotional link to marketing initiatives:
• Customer Research: More diligent research on the client and his/her main purchase drivers, including emotional motivations, will provide insights on new ways to connect and nurture more trust.
• Company Brand: In B2B, the individual product or service brands are not nearly as important as the corporate brand equity, so this must contain relevant, emotional promises. Although practical purchase criteria usually drive product selection (e.g., performance, capabilities, price), the ultimate value of the parent brand perceived by buyers will complete the purchase decision—Can I believe in this company? Can I trust them? Will they deliver on their promises?
• Storytelling: Perhaps the most powerful tool for building confidence and a loyal relationship is to tell a personal story that reiterates key values and emotional benefits. These should reflect the corporate brand and be used in websites, advertising, promotional material, sales pitches, etc., ideally based on insights identified in customer research to ensure they are relevant to the buyer as well. The importance of storytelling was emphasized by Chip and Dan Heath who recently wrote about content and communications in their book Made to Stick. This excellent book elaborated on the concept of “stickiness,” which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his noteworthy book The Tipping Point. The Heath brothers summarized what can make content and communications “sticky” or successful using six principles captured in the acronym “SUCCES”:
∘ “S” Simplicity: Stripping an idea to its core, prioritizing, creating ideas that are simple and profound (using proverbs), focusing (people don't remember lists of ideas)
∘ “U” Unexpectedness: Use surprise to grab people's attention, generate interest, and engage curiosity
∘ “C” Concreteness: To make our ideas clear, relate to human actions and concrete images, emphasize the substance and relevance, and avoid the abstract
∘ “C” Credibility: To make people believe and agree with ideas, help people test ideas for themselves, and use hard numbers to build a case to be remembered
∘ “E” Emotions: How to care about ideas—we're wired to feel things for people, so don't use vague abstractions
∘ “S” Stories: To get people to act on ideas and identify with them, preparing them to respond more effectively. Well-crafted stories inspire emotions that lead to decision making
• Social Media: Peer feedback and recommendations through these new interactive media options have a greater impact on purchase decisions today. It also offers an ideal way for vendors to build their one-to-one customer relationships, assuming the emotional promises are aligned with the corporate brand.