B2B Marketing Excellence Blog

The Underappreciated Value of Brand Experience - Whitespace Opportunity for B2B Brands

As we prepare for our B2B and B2G branding course later this month we've been doing additional research and analysis of the business and government markets that is leading us to look at branding with a deeper perspective.   Branding is much talked about and little understood, even by experienced marketers because it is complex, combining both tangible and intangible elements. In the B2B environment, because there are more players on both the selling side and the buying side, this complexity becomes even more daunting. In snooping around brand paradigms we've been looking for good ways to deconstruct these challenges for the course, and while there's a lot of 'brand stuff' out there, we're focusing on the core aspects of brand-building that are executed through the marketing plan: Brand Experience, Brand Trigger and Brand Perception.

In our analysis, the secret to brand-building around an authentic brand is to value Experience as much as Trigger and Perception and to view them as holistically related. This emphasis on Brand Experience is especially important in a Web 2.0 world where your audience participates in co-creating their own Brand Experience with you. But this focus doesn't always come easily to many marketers, whose budgets are wrapped around the creation and measurement of Triggers and Perception, but it has always been the secret to powerful brand-building. In the B2B and B2G spaces particularly, Brand Experience is critically important and complex.

In our research I thought I'd come upon a great paradigm a few weeks ago on the MarketingProf's Daily Fix blog when I read Paul Williams' Think Reputation Instead of Brand post. It's a great article about how to think of brand-building as building your own or your company's reputation (and it's got a great list of resources). I read it thinking, "Wow, this is great! I agree with him!" But I kept getting hung up on his metaphor in comparing a brand with a reputation. It bugged me for over a week and I think I've finally figured out why.

If a brand was little more than a reputation, our brand fate would always be in the hands of others. But in fact, it's not in their hands, it's in ours and in their relationship with us.

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.

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.

What is B2G Marketing?

As we note in "What is B2B Marketing ?” selling to an organization such as a business or government agency presents the marketer with challenges which are distinct from the consumer sale; however, marketing to a government agency (Business-to-Government, or B2G marketing) is also different than selling to a business customer.

 

Unlike a government agency, a business is tasked with turning a profit for the benefit of its shareholders. Private companies may have more flexibility in how they prioritize profit with other objectives, but in the end, making money is their top priority. Government agencies have fiscal constraints and requirements also, of course, but actually making money is never at the top of their priority list. They exist because they are tasked by the people they serve to achieve a specific mission. These objectives, and how they are to be met, are set out in complicated combinations of laws, regulations, policies and operating directives and are influenced heavily by their political environment, which shifts constantly.

 

These dynamics are just as true at the local level as they are at the state, federal and international levels and the business that sells to these agencies must understand the unique political, legal/procedural and practical factors at play around each government department they serve. They must also understand the “business ecosystem” of companies which commonly partner to win large government contracts in any specific government market. This article is a brief look at how the “Six Ps + Branding” marketing mix is affected by the B2G uniqueness. All these themes will be explored in greater depth in this blog and the B2B Expert’s Forum as well, so sign up for them, contribute your experience and together we’ll all be smarter!

Read on to see how Branding and the 6 Ps apply to B2G Marketing.

What Is B2B Marketing?

Marketing to a business trying to make a profit (Business-to-Business marketing) as opposed to an individual for personal use (Business-to-Consumer, or B2C marketing) is similar in terms of the fundamental principals of marketing. In B2C, B2B and B2G marketing situations, the professional must always:

• successfully match the product/service strengths with the needs of a definable target market; 
• position and price to align the product/service with its market, often an intricate balance; and 
• communicate and sell it in the fashion that demonstrates its value effectively to the target market.

Voila! Easy? Well, no. If it were that easy, we wouldn’t have dedicated our careers to understanding the nuances of marketing. So what are the meaningful differences between B2B and B2C marketing?

A B2C sale is to an individual. That individual may be influenced by other factors such as family members or friends, but ultimately it’s a single person that pulls out their wallet. A B2B sale is to an organization. And in that simple distinction lies a web of complications that differ because of the organizational nature of the sale and which vary widely by firmographic (i.e., “demographic” for segmenting businesses) such as business size, location, industry and revenue base. This article is a brief look at how the “Six P’s + Branding” marketing mix is affected by the B2B uniqueness. All these themes will be explored in greater depth in this blog and the B2B Expert’s Forum as well, so sign up for them, contribute your experience and together we’ll all be smarter!

Read on to see how Branding and the 6 Ps apply to B2B Marketing.