Branding: the heart of B2B marketing
Creating a market-identity
A lot less has been written about the importance of brands in B2B as opposed to B2C, and yet the authors quoted in the previous post, ‘Brands build business’ suggest that brands may be more important in B2B than they are in B2C.
My experience is that brands are more important in B2B because they have to convey more information and be more credible to more audiences within their market.
In B2C, USPs can be honed down to a single, sharp slogan: ‘Whiter than white’. B2B can’t do that in such a catch-all way because one size does not fit all. There are many more influences at work in a B2B market than there are in B2C.
A B2B brand must reflect characteristics of its identity that are relevant to each audience within the market.
Once were warriors…
Some big B2C brands are having to reassess their ‘umbrella’ branding. For example, car manufacturers are finding out what happens when their branding becomes too catch-all and too simplistic.
On 20th October, The New York Times pointed out that during 2009, “only about 20 percent of car shoppers stayed with the same brand when they purchased a new vehicle.” Apparently, twenty-odd years ago, a whopping 80% of American car-buyers stayed loyal to their brand.
In the NYT article, James Farley, Ford Motor Company’s head of marketing, says that today’s car buyer has little use for nostalgia: “I can’t tell you how many car clubs I have been to where they own old Mustangs and vintage T-Birds, but they drive Camrys.” He partly attributes such high levels of churn to the fact that: “Brand loyalty has shrunk because of widespread improvements in the products. The ‘trust factor’ is more or less the same for most cars.” Read the NYT article
In a similar vein, the Financial Times reported on 25th October that GM and Chrysler are radically re-thinking how they approach their brand-promotion. Both companies “have launched far-reaching reviews of their marketing strategies in the latest sign of carmakers adjusting their business in an economic downturn that has crippled their industry.” Read the FT article
In both articles, the underlying theme behind these ailing brands is the lack of focus on customers…
B2B can be better than that
An earlier post looked at the importance of brand ownership:
In B2B marketing, branding is about saying: we own this product.
It may also be about saying: we own its reliability, its short lead-times and its quality. We also own its support, its maintenance and its future up-grading. Most of all, we own the positive contribution it makes to the continued success of our customers’ business.
All of these things are ours: this is what we represent.
Building brand identity: start with market relections
What the market sees reflected by a brand is really all that matters. In B2B, the market may well include distributors and wholesalers, overall solution-providers, specialist consultancies or professions and support and service providers - as well as direct customers or end users.
In addition, there may be user-groups, financial analysts, commentators in the media, standards boards and regulators, industry associations and the general public.
Each of these represents a market reflection - the way the brand is seen by the individual components of the market. And it is these reflections that give a brand its identity – in B2B, a brand’s identity is created in the market.
Matched messages or mixed messages?
B2B marketers need to craft their brand messages so that they are relevant to each market reflection: messages should be matched to audiences – not jumbled-up in a mixed-bag that people have to rummage through to find what’s relevant for them.
And one size is unlikely to fit all because products, services and processes produce different outcomes for different elements of the market.
Successfully communicating these outcomes in a relevant and targeted way is what strengthens brand-identity and, consequently, more clearly differentiates one B2B brand from its competitors.
More on B2B branding:
Brands are now more important than ever Brands build business
Recession marketing. No such thing? The Long Hello: building relationships with B2B brands
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
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