Archive for September, 2009
Recession marketing. No such thing?
Protect market share. Maintain margins. Demonstrate value. Cut costs. Increase ROI. Get closer to customers. Build relationships. Innovate. Drive the brand. Boost visibility. Neutralise competitors. Refresh the message. Take cover!
Around July 2008, I started getting mails about how to protect your business in hard times. About how such-and-such could demonstrate how to do all or [...]
PR and B2B. The perfect couple
Cultivating communications is no job a public-relations agency can do for a company.
This emphatic little gem comes from Regis McKenna in his book ‘Relationship Marketing’. Published in ’92, it’s about how to ‘Own the market through strategic customer relationships’ and is still seen as one of the books on the ‘customer-is-king’ topic.
Well, I think he’s [...]
B2B. Sexy or boring?
This post is from an article by GyroHSR, who are, as they put it themselves:
The world’s largest and most critically acclaimed B-to-B focused agency. GyroHSR has been cited as ‘Top Agency’ 14 times in 14 years by Advertising Age’s B-to-B Magazine, B2B Marketing and the Business Marketing Association International.
www.gyrohsr.com
By Milan Martin. President, GyroHSR, NYC
The saddest [...]
B2B marketing is about buying: What? How? Who?
Marketing is not about selling. Marketing is all about buying:
What are customers buying?
How does buying contribute to their success?
Who is buying?
These are the must-knows that determine tactics in B2B marketing. Cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure – CCC & PPP - provide the strategic direction, but What-How-Who drives implementation.
1. WHAT are customers buying?
Customers [...]
So what is Value? The five B2B buying motivators
Here’s a couple of definitions of ‘value’ from the Encarta Dictionary:
To rate something according to its perceived worth, importance, or usefulness
An amount expressed in money or another medium of exchange that is thought to be a fair exchange for something
In these definitions, two phrases stand out for me: ‘perceived worth’ and ‘thought to be’. So, [...]
Is your marketing doing its job? Is it achieving its two objectives?
There are only two objectives in B2B marketing:
Cultivating consistent customers
Preventing price pressure
These are the objectives that should motivate all B2B marketing activities – the two goals that have to be achieved: CCC and PPP.
If your marketing activities are not delivering bottom-line results in terms of CCC and PPP, then two things are probably happening:
The activities are not [...]
Brands are now more important than ever. Brands are dead.
So which one is it?
Brands are about relationships. Relationships that are centred around ownership: who owns what and what it is they own. They are a visible mark that tells a story.
With a symbol, a few words and perhaps some music, brands have the ability to create powerful meanings. They can be intensely evocative, conjuring the strongest [...]
Making B2B marketing work
The PQRS&T in B2B marketing
Price, Quality, Response, Service and Time.
These are the Five Factors of Value. That may not sound very significant, so let me put it another way:
They are the five reasons that make customers buy, the reasons that deals get done. The five buying motivators. The Big Five.
This Big Five are particularly important [...]
