Marketing in the right direction: Barloworld Logistics

Kate Stubbs deals with some big challenges as marketing manager for Barloworld Logistics. To start with, she’s marketing an intangible: supply chain management doesn’t come in a box with a part number and a price tag. She’s also working in an industry dominated by solid, practical men who know the nuts-and-bolts of freighting stuff from [...]

Brands, Making B2B marketing work

Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 3

Galen de Young of leading B2B marketing agency, Proteus, recommends six steps to check how effective your B2B website is at pulling people in and keeping them engaged.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans.
But before you [...]

Making B2B marketing work, Marcoms

Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 2

B2B Marketing Online suggests six steps to check how effective your B2B website is at pulling people in and keeping them engaged.
Breathe life into your site. B2B marketers have no excuse for failing to deliver a compelling customer experience online.
Alex Blyth presents six golden rules for improving and maintaining your website.

Making B2B marketing work

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 [...]

Brands

B2B fundamentals: ignore them at your profits’ peril

‘Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach in the Digital Age’
That’s the title of a recent research report from Forrester, and here’s an extract from its Overview:
Today’s brand marketing organizations are ill equipped to handle the world of “always on” marketing in the digital age…
Over the next five years, Adaptive Brand Marketing will shift the [...]

Making B2B marketing work

Re-positioning B2B brands: a quick case study

  

The leopard cannot change its spots

In other words, basic characteristics cannot be altered.
Oh, yes they can…
The spots on these ‘leopards’ were changed to fingerprints as part of brand re-positioning for clients demonstrating biometric-based access control solutions at Europe’s biggest corporate security show in 2006.
This was just part of a campaign to influence market perceptions [...]

B2B sales, Brands, Making B2B marketing work, Marcoms

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 [...]

B2B sales, Brands, Marcoms

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 [...]

Marcoms

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 [...]

B2B brands, B2B buying motivators, B2B sales, Brands, Making B2B marketing work

Outstanding B2B marketing: Wunderman for Barloworld Logistics

Who says B2B is boring? Not Wunderman…

Making B2B marketing work, Marcoms