Archive for November, 2009
Creativity in B2B marketing. Are you serious?
Well, actually, yes, we are.
Imagination, inventiveness and originality. Add the concept of ‘vision’ and you are on the path towards innovation – creating new, improved ways of doing things.
This spirit of innovation is generally hailed as a ‘good thing’ in the development of products and services. It certainly doesn’t seem to get actively frowned upon – so [...]
The Long Hello: building brand-relationships in B2B
People come and go. Brands endure.
One reason why marketing doesn’t always pull its weight in B2B is that there is often such a strong emphasis on relationships with customers. Developing and sustaining these relationships can shift attention from managing the brand’s relationship with the overall market. And this can undermine the potential to strengthen sales, margins and [...]
Outstanding B2B marketing: Wunderman for Barloworld Logistics
Who says B2B is boring? Not Wunderman…
The role of ‘Value’ in B2B marketing
In B2B, Value comprises Five Factors: Response, Service, Time, Quality and Price.
These are the criteria that influence and motivate B2B buying decisions. This extract from an ealier post looks at analysing how products, services and processes create Value in relation to each of the Five Factors.
It is a simple approach, but it produces bottom [...]
Measuring B2B marketing performance
Performance is easier to assess when it’s measured against the two objectives of B2B marketing:
Cultivating consistent customers – CCC
Preventing price pressure – PPP
CCC is about keeping your customers loyal and finding more like them: sales and volumes. PPP deals with building and maintaining margins: delivering the right Value to the right people.Â
Are we asking the right questions?
Data, [...]
Getting real in B2B markets
Getting back to fundamentals in B2B marketing: what do you represent?
Brandchannel recently ran a piece about Tagline Guru, and their analysis of 150+ corporate taglines to discover: “the most frequently used words in this year’s taglines, and whether they reveal how companies are strategically re-casting their brand message to forge a closer connection with their customers.” And here, alphabetically, are [...]
B2B marketing communications: clarity is key …
Generating jargon, creating clutter
In ‘The Complete Plain Words’, Sir Ernest Gowers gives a tongue-in-cheek example of how to position yourself as an ‘authority’ on a subject by using a buzz-phrase generator.
For marketers, the message here should be pretty clear: jargon is dangerous.
The Generator was apparently created by the Canadian Department of Defence in the late 1960’s. It’s pretty simple to [...]
Leveraging B2B buying motivators
Developing B2B marketing communications for bottom line results.
All marketers understand the need for getting the right messages to the right people. What’s not so straightforward is defining the messages and who should be getting them.
Marketers need to be looking at what their market is buying, because B2B marketing is not about selling, it’s about buying.
An incisive approach [...]
