I have spent a large part of my career working in the B2B space and have always believed deep down to my core, that at the end of the day B2B is not much different from B2C. When I was at Texas Instruments, I would say that we were a B2E company (Business-to-Engineer) not a B2B esp in online/marketing space - as at the end of the day our job was to influence an individual engineer - a human being.
A human being who often was a mother, a sister, a daughter, a father, a son, a brother, a friend - prone to the same emotions as other human beings. As human beings we bring our emotional sides to work even when we are engineers (I often joked: "Engineers are people too, right?"). So why should a B2B company like Texas Instruments not communicate to its target audience who are engineers as human beings - tapping into their emotional side just as is the core strategy of most B2C marketing efforts that tend to be rich in emotional communication.
Since then I have spent time in the retail/distribution space and my thinking has remained the same. Who is the human being that I am trying to communicate with - on the other side of the web page, mobile app, email, search ad - let me understand her and I can be more effective in getting my message across and have a higher chance in influencing her behavior (and driving a conversion).
Today, on my drive to work, however I started to think that that there are some key differences between B2B and B2C. I still think everything stated above is still correct and at the end of the day all communication is human-to-human (H2H) from a marketer/designer/developer to a consumer of that product whether they be a person in a business spending the company's money or an end consumer at home spending their own money.
However, where I think many B2B firms are very different from most B2C companies is in their understanding and adoption of marketing. In most B2B companies, marketing is often an under-rated, under-developed and under-funded discipline - and marketers inside the company are often low in their enterprise power profiles w/ low influence capacity in executive decision making. Consequently, B2B firms tend to have a poor understanding of brand and how to shape that in their markets.
Of course there are exceptions to the above and we can see that as the number of industrial B2B brands in Interbrand's Best Global Brands report has continued to grow from as few as 5 in 1999 to >20 in the last few years. But these exceptions aside, from my experience and by speaking to many in the B2B space my hypothesis feels legitimate.
Why is this?
I suspect largely because of the very traditional sales driven models of most industrial B2B companies that relied on feet on the ground to be their "marketing" vehicles bringing their brand, product and promotion message to individual customers inside enterprise walls. This model likely evolved because prior to digital there really was no effective and efficient way to reach the people inside businesses. Spending lots of money on newspaper, radio or TV would be a highly inefficient way to reach very targeted groups of people working in specific verticals. So the historical model was the most effective and efficient method. Let's get salespeople. Let's get them trained on our products. Let's get them trained on how to sell our products. Let's get them going into target companies, and finding the right person who makes the buying decision. And let them do the "selling" to close deals.
Then digital happened.
Boom! Now there is suddenly a very effective and efficient channel to reach individuals inside businesses. You can target them down to an individual, and create personalized messages to influence their decision making. More importantly most of these B2B buyers have already evolved their behavior to show their preference for self reliance (primarily via the digital channel) through a lot of their buying journey. The verdict on this is clear from many established research companies e.g. Forrester, CEB.
But the challenge for many B2B companies remains that they still don't understand marketing - esp in the digital sense. Often marketing in B2B companies is largely about event management. And brand is often limited to thinking about logos. So at best pretty superficial.
So there I was on my drive to work thinking - perhaps, I had it wrong all this time and B2B is different from B2C.
But in thinking it through as I did here, I still resort back to the idea that B2B still is about communicating and influencing an individual - no different than B2C. And as more and more digitally savvy people join B2B firms, it is their first and foremost responsibility to lead the marketing flag inside the B2B companies. The good news is that many B2B leaders are recognizing that the world has changed and value creation is not just about sales and finance - leading to a B2B shopping spree for digital talent. And if they don't get that marketing and brand lead digital value creation, then they may very well - not be around soon.
A human being who often was a mother, a sister, a daughter, a father, a son, a brother, a friend - prone to the same emotions as other human beings. As human beings we bring our emotional sides to work even when we are engineers (I often joked: "Engineers are people too, right?"). So why should a B2B company like Texas Instruments not communicate to its target audience who are engineers as human beings - tapping into their emotional side just as is the core strategy of most B2C marketing efforts that tend to be rich in emotional communication.
Since then I have spent time in the retail/distribution space and my thinking has remained the same. Who is the human being that I am trying to communicate with - on the other side of the web page, mobile app, email, search ad - let me understand her and I can be more effective in getting my message across and have a higher chance in influencing her behavior (and driving a conversion).
Today, on my drive to work, however I started to think that that there are some key differences between B2B and B2C. I still think everything stated above is still correct and at the end of the day all communication is human-to-human (H2H) from a marketer/designer/developer to a consumer of that product whether they be a person in a business spending the company's money or an end consumer at home spending their own money.
However, where I think many B2B firms are very different from most B2C companies is in their understanding and adoption of marketing. In most B2B companies, marketing is often an under-rated, under-developed and under-funded discipline - and marketers inside the company are often low in their enterprise power profiles w/ low influence capacity in executive decision making. Consequently, B2B firms tend to have a poor understanding of brand and how to shape that in their markets.
Of course there are exceptions to the above and we can see that as the number of industrial B2B brands in Interbrand's Best Global Brands report has continued to grow from as few as 5 in 1999 to >20 in the last few years. But these exceptions aside, from my experience and by speaking to many in the B2B space my hypothesis feels legitimate.
Why is this?
I suspect largely because of the very traditional sales driven models of most industrial B2B companies that relied on feet on the ground to be their "marketing" vehicles bringing their brand, product and promotion message to individual customers inside enterprise walls. This model likely evolved because prior to digital there really was no effective and efficient way to reach the people inside businesses. Spending lots of money on newspaper, radio or TV would be a highly inefficient way to reach very targeted groups of people working in specific verticals. So the historical model was the most effective and efficient method. Let's get salespeople. Let's get them trained on our products. Let's get them trained on how to sell our products. Let's get them going into target companies, and finding the right person who makes the buying decision. And let them do the "selling" to close deals.
Then digital happened.
Boom! Now there is suddenly a very effective and efficient channel to reach individuals inside businesses. You can target them down to an individual, and create personalized messages to influence their decision making. More importantly most of these B2B buyers have already evolved their behavior to show their preference for self reliance (primarily via the digital channel) through a lot of their buying journey. The verdict on this is clear from many established research companies e.g. Forrester, CEB.
But the challenge for many B2B companies remains that they still don't understand marketing - esp in the digital sense. Often marketing in B2B companies is largely about event management. And brand is often limited to thinking about logos. So at best pretty superficial.
So there I was on my drive to work thinking - perhaps, I had it wrong all this time and B2B is different from B2C.
But in thinking it through as I did here, I still resort back to the idea that B2B still is about communicating and influencing an individual - no different than B2C. And as more and more digitally savvy people join B2B firms, it is their first and foremost responsibility to lead the marketing flag inside the B2B companies. The good news is that many B2B leaders are recognizing that the world has changed and value creation is not just about sales and finance - leading to a B2B shopping spree for digital talent. And if they don't get that marketing and brand lead digital value creation, then they may very well - not be around soon.
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