B2B branding: a profit-pumping heart
This post first appeared as an online article in Marketing Mix, South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.
Brands mean ownership
We can all recall an ad that lost its link with the brand: “Great! Clever, sharp, funny, hard-hitting. What company was it?” Or, even worse, ‘What was the product?’ No brand: no ownership.
In B2B marketing, branding is about saying: we own this product or service and, most of all, we own the positive contribution it makes to our customers’ success.
It may also be about saying: we own the outcomes produced by its reliability, its short lead-times, its quality, its support, its maintenance and its future development. All of these things are ours: this is what we represent.
B2B branding is the work of building associations between a company’s ownership of the brand and their ownership of what the brand represents. These associations are not created by logos or slogans. They are solely about the associations created in the market around ownership: who owns what and what it is they own.
Strong brands build business
Marketers understand that brands are symbols, something which represents something else. Brands can evoke powerful associations and allegiances. In their most potent forms, we may love them or loathe them - think of national flags and sporting emblems.
Weak brands – those with little or no meaning - are particularly common in B2B as opposed to B2C marketing. When it comes to cans of baked beans, there’s one brand for me. I’ll go beanless rather than break that allegiance. But is the same true for a company buying a baked bean canning-plant?
The answer is yes: a B2B brand can generate such far-reaching, consistent associations of trust, fulfilled-expectations and satisfaction that customers simply won’t look anywhere else – won’t even consider another canning-plant supplier.
Trust, satisfaction and fulfilled-expectations. These are imperatives in your market’s relationship with your brand: that your products will match past experiences or proposed deliverables.
What is your brand?
Think of the brand as a reflection of your company in a mirror. You hold the brand up to the mirror and it reflects everything the company represents. You don’t see the brand staring back, you see the company.
When the CEO holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected when production, finance, sales, distribution and marketing look in the mirror? Rarely. In fact, very rarely.
There are probably as many different reflections in this mirror as there are people looking at it. The brand becomes such a confusion of images that it’s meaningless. No matter what the company is selling, the brand may as well be symbolised by a blue potato eating a camel.
Market reflections: how B2B brands are created
In B2B, the overall market may include distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies; and support and service providers - as well as end-users. In addition, there may be financial analysts; commentators in the media; regulators; industry associations and user-groups.
Each of these represents a ‘market reflection’ – the way the brand is seen by individual audiences in the market. And it is these reflections that give a brand its identity. Unlike B2C, in B2B, a brand’s identity is created entirely by the market. Not by comms agencies or graphic designers, but by something much more in tune with commercial reality and its latest trends: the market. What it sees is all that matters. In B2B, the market gives you your brand.
B2B markets become confused and uncertain if the reflections are unclear and inconsistent. So people draw their own conclusions. They create their own associations, set their own expectations and decide for themselves how much they trust the brand and what it represents.
Consequence? Ownership of the brand is lost and your credibility is cut to shreds. Sales fall, margins get squeezed and market share shrinks. Bad. Very bad.
Weak brands build business barriers
This loss of brand-ownership and market-credibility is a formidable, ongoing obstacle to building sales, margins and loyalty. It consistently generates perceptions in the market that have no relation to what your company actually represents: ‘Oh? I never knew it could do that.’ ‘I didn’t realise you guys knew anything about this.’ ‘What? You mean you can handle this too? ‘Oh yes, I know XYZ Inc. They sell those potatoes that eat blue camels. Er, don’t they?’
Are they talking about us?
More than ever, market reflections - that diversity of associations made by the market with the brand – are what influences a company’s ability to increase sales, retain customers and protect margins. And this influence is increasing as more lanes keep getting added to the ‘information superhighway’.
For example, there is rapidly-growing interest in social media as a way for people to share their experiences about B2B suppliers and products. And this goes both ways, companies are joining the discussion on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to present their brand-messages and interact more directly with their markets.
So, it’s now more important then ever for B2B companies to ensure delivery of a credible, relevant and compelling reflection of the brand to each audience in their market. As B2B companies become more and more visible to their markets, it has to be true that the brand is your real business.
Be the brand. No, it’s not a cliché. It’s seriass: be the brand
Brand management is not the business of designers and communications agencies. Yup, you heard that one right. It’s not that designers and agencies produce poor or inappropriate work. Quite the reverse. It’s just that they have no influence over how clients build and maintain trust and satisfaction, or how they fulfil customers’ expectations. That’s not their job. As a B2B marketer, it’s yours.
In his book Ackoff’s Fables, the eminent management consultant, Russell Ackoff, describes a problem-solving process he calls ‘idealized redesign’. Although not specifically related to branding, the process is certainly relevant for a company that wants to ‘Be the Brand’:
“Assume that the entity (ie the brand) that has the problem was destroyed last night, but everything else remains the same. Redesign that entity so as to eliminate the problem that faces it. The redesign is subject to only two constraints: first it must be technologically feasible, and second, it must obey the same externally imposed constraints (eg the laws of the land) to which the current system is subject.”
“In addition, it should be designed so that it can 1. improve itself by learning from its own experience, 2. adapt to a changing environment, and 3. be improved by being redesigned again in the future.”
B2B marketers can use ‘idealized redesign’ to define how their brand should be reflected in the market. They can start the process by asking the (rather long) question: what market reflections will attract and retain customers and maintain margins?
The answers will provide a stimulating roadmap for your company’s development as we move deeper into 2010 and a period of slow, cautious growth in B2B markets. The economy may be improving but negative memories of recession will definitely remain and strongly influence B2B buying-decisions.
For marketers, this means it’s essential to generate brand reflections that are not only credible, relevant and compelling but also highly reassuring to each audience in their overall market.
Visit Marketing Mix – South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.
More on brands and branding:
Brands build business Outcomes make the difference The Long Hello: building brand-relationships
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