B2B Brand: Lead Generator and Competitive Defense at Minimal Cost

I just had lunch with a former client who is perched on the verge of amazing market success. She's bringing a new product with a solid ROI into a new market with no competitors currently focused on this market opportunity. Even better, she's on the verge of lining up significant endorsements and a government regulation change that - together or separately - will literally shove customers at her. She's poised to make a killing, but she's got a strategic problem. When the endorsements go public and the leads start to flood in, competitors will start crawling out of the woodwork, targeting her first mover advantage in this new juicy market opportunity she's helped to create. She's smart and knows she has to prepare so she doesn't end up handing the market she's spent so much time and money developing to some other company in the space who spins up fancy marketing to confuse her prospect base and extend what is already a frustratingly long sales cycle.

So we brainstormed. She's certainly got business assets: a patented technology that works, happy customers willing to talk, financial support from the parent company, endorsements from multiple and diverse influencers in her industry and a no brainer business case. The asset she doesn't have in her arsenal yet is a brand and a messaging platform to support it. What? Can I seriously propose that a soft and squishy brand could be an asset for a startup that can't afford zillions in advertising? More importantly, does she have the time and money to create it? The answer to both questions is Yes! it will be an asset for her and best of all, she doesn't have to budget a major (i.e., high cost) advertising blitz in order to leverage its value for her shareholders.

This scenario illustrates one of the most fascinating differences between B2B and B2C marketing and how smart B2B branding can be both affordable and impactful on a company's business success. The essence of this difference is that my friend's B2B target audience is a bunch of big companies, but if you list them out, even including multiple contacts per organization, they all fit on a spreadsheet without crashing your laptop. At this stage in her development, media buys are much less important than some well-placed endorsements and references at key trade shows and other venues where the prospects all congregate. Combined with some targeted public relations and modest lead generation outreach that leverages the government regulation sea change, she can get in front of all the right people fairly quickly and if her brand promise and product materials are clean and compelling, she's starting to stuff her pipeline.

Let's look at how she can develop her brand strategy to be a key aspect of her product launch effort.

To determine a brand's potential asset value in this situation let's look at what is going to happen when the big endorsements and regulation changes come down; she expects them to receive so much press attention among her target audience that her prospect base will be scrambling to comply. Her prospects will wake up one day to find memos from lawyers and insurance agents that say "take action or face fines and penalties!" and they'll read the regulatory briefs and talk to their advisors and go on the hunt for the solutions to this new problem that didn't exist the night before when they left the office.

As these prospects (and their advisors) go hunting, they will find one of two things from my friend's company. Either they'll find obscure references in regulatory bulletins to "a new *blank*blank* technology" and start googling *blank*blank* or they'll find articles referencing my friend's brand name that provides *blank*blank* and a web site that has industry endorsements, problem/solution statements about the new regulations and satisfied customer testimonials. In the case of the former, the prospects may drop an email but will certainly keep looking. In the latter case, they will become warm leads immediately. They may keep looking but they will already associate my friend's brand name with a certain amount of comfort, knowing that one provider out there understands their situation and has a solution to their new problem. And if they read more articles that reference my friend's brand, their comfort level just keeps going up that this new regulatory headache can be pain-managed. It should take competitors six-to-twelve months to offer a meaningful alternative product, and as soon as they enter the market they'll be on the defensive because my friend's company - today an unknown - will already be "the leader" with greatest name recognition and the fattest pipeline.

How is the brand an asset in this circumstance? Didn't I just describe a good web site with an attractive logo? Nope. It's a lot more than a cool logo and an informative site. Her web site is certainly going to be a primary brand communication channel in this particular scenario, but notice the interplay between press mentions and government/endorser mentions that I described. This technology she's offering up is reasonably complex and if each of these sources (her company communication, press and endorser) describe the solution differently and in long-winded technical language, her company name is going to get lost in the shuffle. But if she is careful to educate her audience in the vocabulary of the problem and solution, presenting her brand name as the short-hand version of the solution through credible spokespeople and fact-based materials, she will increase the likelihood that her brand will be discussed consistently through each of these communications channels as the solution itself. If she executes well her brand is on the way to becoming the "Kleenex" of this industry niche and erecting a huge barrier to the competition.

Branding is much more than cool graphics and expensive ad buys; as we discuss in "Brand Does Not Equal Logo," your brand is the sum total experience your audience has with your company or product. The core communications elements such as name, logo and tag line act as triggers to remind your audience of that "total experience," but they are only triggers. The real work in turning your brand into an asset is to create the (positive) meaning which is triggered. That sounds like a lot of work which sets off "expensive bells" for big and small companies alike. Can my friend afford to invest in creating her brand asset?

The pithy answer would be "can she afford not to?" but that's not very helpful on a tight budget (and who doesn't have one of those?). The true answer for any budget is Yes! Because the brand must first be created by what she does and how she talks about her company through all her material - from her web site home page to her billing invoice. If all her material is true to the value she provides her customers, and this message comes across consistently through the visual, verbal and "live" interactions she has with her audiences, she will have built a brand platform. And a solid brand platform can be built upon slowly, if the budget only allows for minimal outreach and organic growth through word of mouth and other high-touch channels, or it can be built upon more rapidly by adding aggressive awareness and direct response advertising.

In both cases, low budget or large budget, a brand built on a solid platform weaves efficiency into the communications process as core messages and value points are repeated and become associated with the brand triggers. The end result is that even a small budget can be more wisely spent with some up-front discipline to identify the essential brand elements and key messages and how best to express them through multiple communication channels.

My friend is smart. She knows she's got to create marketing materials and is already thinking about how to factor in an essential brand platform strategy into her messaging strategy. In a defensive situation in which she needs to protect her market advantage, this is like making the bricks used to build the castle walls. Next she has to start construction by educating the larger audience of press, analysts and influencers who will be talking incessantly about this once the floodgates open. Her goal in the education and outreach is to frame the issue, define the vocabulary the industry uses to discuss it and position her company brand as the best example of a solution available today. This process is straightforward public relations - and good PR folks will know exactly what to do with a solid brand and messaging platform in accomplishing these objectives. They'll take it and run with it, talking up all the issues and positioning the brand name in the solution position.

When she starts lead generation activities to address this new "industry challenge" that the PR folks are helping the market understand, she'll use the same vocabulary and brand messages. At that point most of the strategic positioning work is already done and her lead gen activities will focus that work on tight messaging, highlighting specific benefits to targeted customer segments with compelling calls to action - all of which simply reinforces the brand at the same time the earlier PR investments increase the likelihood that the lead gen vehicles will be paid attention to and acted on (generating good response and conversion rates in marketerspeak). If coordinated well, the prospect audience will encounter the brand message multiple times through multiple channels and brand awareness will naturally result from the sales cycle itself, at minimal or no meaningful increase in cost.

My friend has a terrific opportunity to build a solid brand capable of helping her aggressively establish her place in a new market and protect that position against new entrants caught off guard. To capitalize on this and ensure that her brand supports her business plan, she will need to develop it intentionally, not reactively, so that it rolls out in a coordinated fashion across all the channels she uses to touch prospects, customers and market influencers. If she is successful she will have build at an asset for her company, a value to her customers, a growth accelerator for her business and a competitive advantage - all by developing a solid brand platform and executing it through all the media she would be using anyway to build her business and sell her product. The brand won't cost her anything more than some brain energy up front to build a solid Brand Platform she can execute against, and yet it will pay for itself in efficiency and market credibility many times over.

The "brain energy" of developing a B2B brand platform is simple in theory and yet has many layers of subtlety. We'll be developing this theme and outlining specific methodologies in future blog posts and in our professional development course: Corporate Brand Strategy: Accelerating Company Growth, held in Arlington, VA on May 8, 2008. Follow along and don't be shy about submitting questions or offering your own perspective in comments.