B2B Marketing Excellence Blog

Apple Takes the Leap into B2B Enterprise Sales

Are B2C and B2B marketing really that different? After all, most consumer products – from candy to motorcycles - rely heavily on B2B distribution deals to reach all those millions of individual customers. Can’t a successful consumer products company just turn their distribution prowess into great B2B sales and marketing to enterprise clients?

Apple’s March 6 announcement that the iPhone will be sold to the enterprise market with its June software release gives us a chance to deconstruct the relevant differences between a B2C distribution model and B2B direct sales. As we watch Apple's efforts to sell the iPhone into the corporate market we'll also observe whether Steve Jobs can lead his company into straddling the multi-headed target market beast as well as Michael Dell has. Like any good technology pitch man, Jobs seems to have the product issues under control, but his market-facing brand and distribution challenges are where we can expect to see the strategy succeed or fail. Right now, the jury’s out.

Let’s look at what Apple is doing to address the B2B market and evaluate their potential for success and challenge in a “Six P’s + Branding” analysis framework.

Logo Does Not Equal Brand

“I have a brand! See? Here’s my logo.”

This simplistic view of branding is as tempting to overworked marketers as it is to the CEO that doesn't want to think about funding a full-out brand effort. It's also a lot easier to understand than the complex art of true branding, which evokes multidimensional meaning and association to communicate tons of information through the placement of simple visual, verbal and auditory stimulie (i.e., messages). Yeah. Like a logo. 

Even though it's understandable to want to simplify complexity, "keep it simple" is not really a compelling justification for a reputable should-know-better industry group that recently hyped a strategic brand seminar this way – “Strategic branding [makes] the tactics of branding work best-from advertising to great graphic design,” implying that branding is a result of hook lines and logo design.

The best brands do use logos and other visual elements to evoke positive and deep associations for their audience, but the professional marketer – like the people who are putting on that seminar above – really should know better than to confuse the graphic design with the associated meaning underlying the brand itself.

Good marketers know that a strong brand evokes emotional associations with its logo, but why is it the logo and other visual elements don’t constitute the brand itself? Where does the experience underlying the association really come from? These are some of the issues B2B Marketing Excellence explores in our professional development courses on strategic branding (next course May 8, 2008), but let’s examine the basics. Come to the course if you want to understand the subject in depth and learn how to make branding work for your company or client base, but absorb the simple meaning of the concept here.

B2B Blogs to Watch

I can't say I've looked through every one of these recommended B2B marketing and strategy blogs, but the scope and depth of subject matter alone makes these good resource listings: Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs.

Over time, B2B Marketing Excellence will recommend other resources and listings and create our own list, the in-depth version we will host in our social networking community, B2B Expert's Forum, but in my opinion none of us will live long enough to justify recreating any wheels. Let's all ride the ones that work.

Anyone know of one that isn't in their listing? Comment with the url below and let them know as well.