Market reflections: managing B2B brand perceptions
What are ‘market reflections’ and why do they matter?
Think of the brand as a reflection of your company in a mirror. You hold the brand up to this mirror and it reflects everything the company represents in the market. You don’t see the brand staring back at you, you see what the market sees.
When an end-user holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected back when VARs, consultants and the media look in the mirror?
Very often, there are as many different images in the mirror as there are people looking at it.
And this lack of brand-cohesion creates confusion and uncertainty in the market, weakening the brand by creating mis-perceptions of what it represents.
Building perceptions of success
One of the cornerstone posts on The Long Hello looks at how B2B brands should be making a major contribution to the bottom line by creating compelling associations in the market:
Brands can generate such strong associations of trust and fulfilled-expectations that customers simply won’t consider another supplier.
B2B branding is about saying: we own this product or service. 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 development. But most of all:
We own the positive contribution we make to customers’ continued success.
Are they looking at us? Identifying the market’s composition
B2B marketers understand that their market is like a jigsaw – many pieces go to make the whole.
Of course, this little jigsaw is far from complete.
A typical B2B market may also include distributors and wholesalers; support and service providers; user-groups; financial analysts; standards boards and statutory regulators; industry associations and the general public. And it will almost certainly include different ’stakeholders’ within each individual customer, such as finance, sales, production and distribution.
But it is a starting point for building an overall picture of the market.
Influencing market reflections: relevance, relevance, relevance
Having listed the reflections, marketers perhaps then need to ask some questions in the market:
- how does the brand reflect itself to each component of the market
- how relevant are your marcoms to these individual components
- what needs to change in order to achieve a consistent reflection of the brand
Relevance is crucial because it builds credibility and confidence. And relevance is all about outcomes - the outcomes that are produced for each component of the market: what does this brand do for me?
You have to talk to the market
In order to identify what is relevant, you need to get out of the office and talk to the market. Writing in Marketing Magazine about the core skills of great marketers, Mark Ritson sees this as:
the fundamental starting point for any great marketer: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or ‘important’ you consider yourself.
For a more detailed look at how to create relevant marcoms:
Marketing is not about selling. It’s about buying
Outcomes are the differentiators The role of Value in B2B marketing Getting real in B2B
Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators Building brand relationships: The Long Hello
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
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