I talked to her in March about her approach to B2B marketing and how she has delivered some of SA’s most innovative and arresting B2B marcoms, positioning her company as a real thought leader in its field and generating unprecedented positive response from her market.

B2B’s double hard-sell: internal, external

Most B2B marketers have to wear two sales hats: one for their colleagues and one for the market.  With only a few exceptions, I’ve had to sell the marketing function to every senior exec I’ve worked alongside, whether they’re a consulting client, a fellow employee or working for an external vendor or partner. 

I’m not talking about selling them new ideas for a particular marketing activity, I mean selling them the entire concept of B2B marketing: what it achieves for the bottom line and how it does that. If you take them through a formal presentation of the function and its objectives, they’re usually happy to acknowledge that getting the right caps for a golf day and arranging the Christmas party ain’t top of your list. 

Everyone’s a marketer…

When it comes to marketing, it seems everyone’s got an opinion that they’re keen to share – even those who’ve never even met a customer, let alone dealt with a buying decision maker. This is because some of our outputs are such a visible representation of the people we work with and the ‘commentators’ are motivated by a desire to see the organisation thrive. Surely, that’s it? 

But sometimes it’s a matter of letting the baker do what the baker does best and marketers often need to be very firm on this. I wouldn’t dream of questioning someone’s choice of accounting software or suggesting that we shouldn’t use that type of robot welder. Why? Not my field of expertise and I know zip about it. Now, what was it you wanted to tell me? 

Selling to the C-Suite: know your competition

Stubbs’ target market is relatively small and commercially sophisticated. Within current and prospective end-users of outsourced supply chain management, it’s a typical C-suite audience and their attention is in demand from direct competitors plus a whole host of unrelated vendors selling everything from ICT solutions to environmental consulting. 

The audience’s attention is being fought for by so many vendors simply because big buying decisions lie in their hands.

B2B marketers really do need to be aware of this and to recognise that what we are really competing for is the C-suite’s time and their focus.

The big question then becomes: how do we get that time and focus? 

Know what you’re selling

Kate says that Barloworld Logistics are selling the application of original thinking based on a sound understanding of supply chain management: “We sell our thinking, particularly in terms of problem-solving within our field of expertise. We consider ourselves to be real thought leaders and innovators. It’s what defines our whole approach to managing your supply chain. As a marketer, it’s my job to engage buying decision makers on that basis.” 

I was so impressed by how Stubb’s does this that I featured an example on The Long Hello last year. The ‘Puzzles’ campaign with direct marketing agency, Wunderman, struck me as being really arresting, innovative and motivating. 

What really impressed me was that a B2B company had taken such a radically different approach to positioning their brand. I thought at the time that I would’ve loved to be a fly-on-the-wall when the concept was presented internally. Hold on to yer hats, boys! 

Stubbs says, “It certainly raised some eyebrows.” I bet it did …

Relevance and creativity

Anyone who reads the specialist trade and business press is aware of just how dull a lot of its B2B advertising can be. And yet these advertisers are all competing for the same thing: the time and focus of the C-suite in other businesses. 

It’s not that this audience doesn’t have time to focus on things that will contribute to the continued success of their organisation – that’s the very essence of their jobs. 

What they don’t have time for is stuff that they perceive as having no relevance to aiding that success. Big difference. And one which is overlooked by many B2B marketers: why should I take time to focus on you? 

Stubbs is not one of those marketers: “The whole puzzles campaign was driven by the imperative of making you stop, think and respond. As problem-solving innovators, we need to get decision makers focused on our thinking and encourage contact.” 

Campaign results have been outstanding, motivating high levels of direct, executive response. Stubbs says, “It initiated C-Suite contact on two levels. Many executives and their colleagues, friends and families were so intrigued that they wanted the puzzles’ answers or to know they’d got them right. Professionally, it opened doors for our experts to interact with executives who had a highly positive perception of the brand.” 

Building brand relationships

Long sales cycles are commonplace in B2B and Stubbs says that her company typically works with cycles of 18 months. “For our market, managing the supply chain is a critical component of their business. Making changes to existing processes or switching supplier are high-impact decisions which require careful planning and consideration. This takes time.” 

One way that Barloworld Logistics encourages long-term interaction with the brand is through an annual survey that examines industry trends, challenges and influences. Conducted by Frost & Sullivan, this year’s supplychainforesight focuses on ‘Growth in Adversity’ and addresses the role of supply chain strategy in enabling recovery from recession. 

Almost half of the nearly 400 respondents were CEO’s or senior execs and 23% of the companies surveyed were multinationals with revenues of over R5 billion. It’s real C-suite stuff and is treated accordingly by both respondents and readers. Stubbs sees it as, “An integral part of the brand that positions us as an authority in the minds of senior executives within our market.” 

Brand relationships are a living thing

Stubbs releases the survey with a media briefing just prior to its national launch. “We then host breakfasts in Durban, Cape Town and JHB on three consecutive days. Respondents and the market in general are invited and we arrange for industry leaders to give us their view on supply chains in SA as well as their interpretation of the results.” 

“We support this with reports on our site plus a dedicated site at www.supplychainforesight.com” 

Once the main launch is complete, Stubbs runs industry-specific launches. “This year we had an FMCG & Retail breakfast and an Automotive evening session. These are more focused interactions and typically result in good engagement and discussion. Once again, we invite industry leaders to voice their opinion on the survey results and to give us their view on what is happening in supply chains in SA.” 

Positive response to the brand

Barloworld Logistics received a special merit award at the Logistics Achiever Awards for the survey’s contribution to the industry. Stubbs says, “Even competitors quote the survey and it is frequently used internationally to benchmark the industry. We receive emails and calls thanking us and requests to focus on specific topics in the next survey. We encourage this type of response so that we can include common focus areas in the next survey.” 

Reinforce your relevance

The company hosts breakfast meetings with execs from the same discipline – HR, Finance, Operations – as well as after-hours sessions to introduce new service offerings or ideas for very targeted audiences. Stubbs’ goal here is to strengthen industry networks and brand relationships by facilitating knowledge sharing and engagement on topical issues.

The road ahead?

Stubbs sees it like this: “Continually finding new and relevant ways to engage our audiences. We must understand clients’ needs thoroughly in order to create relevant, interesting messages that break through the clutter. Messages also need to be simple and clear. Find creative ways to facilitate engagement and relationship building that is commercially beneficial for both parties. Focus and relevance is key. And make sure it’s enjoyable for everyone involved.” 

Way to go, Kate.

Wunderman, Johannesburg:
Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director. debi_loftie_eaton@za.wunderman.com

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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 get started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step back to assess your efforts to date.

Below are six steps to help you do that. While the list is not exhaustive, my hope is that these steps will help you improve the performance of existing assets and develop strong future content marketing efforts. 

1. Map site content to the buying cycle

Some people segment the buying cycle into three or four stages. B2B Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee segments it into seven stages. However you choose to define it, analyze your buying cycle and make sure you have substantial, valuable content that speaks to each stage. Prospects have questions at each stage in the buying process. Each question represents an opportunity for content. Think about what should be free and what should be gated (Chris Koch and Michele Linn had good posts on this recently).

Also remember people have different learning styles, and consider having multiple media available for each style. Analyze the effectiveness of your existing content vis-à-vis your buying cycle, determine the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and develop a plan to round out your content.

2. Reduce friction on gated content

Review registration pages for items that reduce conversion rate. Yes, this includes how much information you’re asking for, but it also includes many other things.

Ask yourself, is the page design and intent clear, or do you have many other things potentially distracting visitors from taking the desired action or perhaps even obscuring the desired action? Have you reduced the anxiety of registering? Are the benefits of doing so clearly stated? Have you illustrated credibility, e.g., are there recognized third-party endorsements on the page? Have you told visitors what you’re going to do with their information?

Todd Miechiels had a great post on reducing site visitors’ anxiety last year, and Ben Hanna gave some strong, practical examples of ways to improve B2B conversion rates by reducing buyer risk.

3. Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from them. Take a look at last year’s numbers for the content on your site. What was the most popular content? What were your most popular landing pages? What were the sources of the visitors? Did those sources change over time? What organic keywords drove traffic to that content? What did these visitors do? What were the conversion rates? Where did they go next? What made those pages successful? Equally important to analyze is the content you thought would do well, but didn’t.

Compare and contrast the successes and the failures, and you’ll likely find strong clues to help you develop a best practices model. But don’t just use this information for prospective content. You can likely redeem some of your previously less-than-successful content by making improvements or repurposing and relaunching that content.

4. Capture the value of content

If your content is a web page, it’s pretty easy to track the results. But what if your content is a PDF or some other digital asset? These assets can drive readers and viewers back into your website. However, unless you’ve coded the links appropriately, these visits will show up as direct visits instead of being attributed to your content marketing assets. Obviously, you should ensure future content marketing assets have such links, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t make these changes to existing content as well.

5. Include sharing options with your content

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides can be powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools. At the same time, they’re expensive to create. They’re also hard to get into the hands of the right people. You may get one of these assets into the hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the prospect’s company who will influence the purchase decision.

Embedding social sharing options is a great way to help push the reach of great content, and modifying existing content marketing assets to include social sharing options is fairly painless.

6. Optimized content for search

Finally, optimize your content for search. While social media can play a big role in the visibility of good content marketing assets, SEO will help ensure online visibility over the long term. Make sure your content marketing assets and their related landing pages are optimized and aligned with the keyword strategy for the piece. This includes optimizing copy as well as other on- and off-page factors. While it does take a bit more work, you can optimize PDFs for search as well. 

Related posts:

Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1     

Is your B2B website building the bottom Line? Part 2

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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. There can be few B2B marketers who remain unconvinced of the importance of the online channel.

As Catherine Lawford, MD of customer experience consultancy Seren, puts it, “Online is more than important. It is becoming – and will continue to be – the single most important tool in a marketer’s armoury. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of customers will decide whether to engage with a company by first looking at its Internet site, creating a poor online experience makes no business sense.” 

Yet, despite this – and despite the fact that most B2B marketers know exactly how much this matters – the B2B world is lagging some way behind its B2C counterparts in terms of online customer experience. 

Martina Schell, head of user engagement at marketing agency Archibald Ingall Stretton, says, “While B2B online experience has developed very little since the early buzz in the 1990s, consumer-facing online experiences have developed around user needs and technology.” 

She continues, “This has steeply raised expectations of business websites. Remember that all business customers are also consumers. Today the majority of B2B customer experiences seem clunky, poorly thought out and ill-matched to the complex demands of business customers. This is a great opportunity to lead in your category.” 

Part of the problem is that while much has been said and written about how companies should talk to their customers on the phone and how they should engage with them face-to-face, there are few hard and fast rules about what constitutes best practice online. 

By following these six rules most B2B marketers should be able to dramatically improve the online customer experience they offer, and so gain significant competitive advantage. 

1. Make your site easy to navigate 

“Still too many online experiences are damaged by the fundamentals not being in place,” says Darrel Worthington, director of information architecture at digital consultancy, Rufus Leonard. “Poor product and service categorisation, insufficient product detail and no online product support to fill the gaps. Poor search facilities and torturous navigation. This all leads to confusion, increased calls to the customer help desk, loss of sales and ultimately brand damage.” 

Simon Boydell, marketing manager for Retail Eyes, a provider of customer experience improvement programmes to sites such as O2 and William Hill, offers this advice on how to get it right, “Keep content succinct and to the point and use standard fonts; the best are Arial and Verdana as they are easier to read. And ensure your text has room to breathe, is well spaced and not squashed together. Don’t be tempted to try and cram too much information on one page as this will only turn off a visitor.” 

He adds, “Balance your text with images and good visuals to grab attention. Customers only read 25 per cent of the content on a page, so making your site visually appealing will help ensure customers stay longer. But make sure they are good quality images, reflecting the standard of your product or service, and don’t be tempted to use too many flashing images – two per page is the maximum.” 

Robert Barnes, operations director at web design agency Design UK, reports that law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner recently launched a redeveloped site with improved navigation and more interesting presentation. The outcome was was higher traffic numbers with the average visitor staying on the site approximately 50 per cent longer. One-page visits are down by a third, he says. 

2. Make information easy to find  

“Customers don’t have time to trawl through websites,” advises Tom Pelly, senior consultant at customer service software provider Transversal. “They want quick, comprehensive answers to their questions. 

Replace keyword search with natural language search that understands questions asked in plain English and provides the right information, quickly and in a format that meets B2B customer needs.” 

3. Ensure your site is fast and responsive  

“Avoiding slow levels of service online must be a top priority,” argues Graham Moore, e-retail specialist at infrastructure provider Zeus Technology. “Marketers must work with IT to ensure sites can cope with peaks in traffic. This is especially important when launching promotions online – as there’s nothing more frustrating than launching a campaign only to find that the website crashes.” 

This is also an important issue if you use a large amount of rich media. Neil Barton, director at web hosting company Hostway, says, “While multimedia content can be visually impressive it can also have a detrimental effect on website performance if not managed correctly. Traffic management solutions are now becoming so intelligent that businesses can start prioritising e-commerce traffic over visitors who are simply browsing, which again can help optimise the online experience.” 

4. Integrate with other channels 

Do not fall into the trap of seeing your website as an isolated channel. Your customers are not interested in the channel they use to contact you; they only care that you respond in a timely and effective way to their enquiries. 

So ensure you put in place all the resources and processes necessary to cope with online enquiries. Be clear on your site about response times and then ensure you deliver on that promise. 

In the same way, you should aim for a unified platform that gives you a single view of customers and prospects across all channels. 

Frank Lord, VP EMEA at e-commerce software provider ATG, explains why, “A unified platform is key to delivering a good online experience. B&Q has increased business-to-business sales using a single e-commerce platform. The platform runs across its website, more than 330 stores, transactional catalogues in showrooms and three call centres to provide cross-channel integration and a single customer view. A single unified platform enables B&Q to better understand customer behaviour and anticipate their needs. As a result, B&Q has increased online conversion rates by 40 per cent.” 

He continues, “AT&T has also used e-commerce to gain market share with its B2B customer base. It has rolled out more than 50,000 unique sites for its business customers, managed centrally from one ATG platform. Each site is tailored to a particular customer segment – offering B2B customers a personalised online experience, increased satisfaction and new customer acquisition rates. In fact, AT&T achieved a dramatic increase of nearly 100 per cent year-over-year in new customer additions, and it significantly reduced customer churn.” 

5. Provide genuinely useful information

More and more B2B marketers are using content marketing as a way of capturing prospect data, engaging potential customers and so generating leads. However, if you intend to request information from visitors to your site you must ensure that you give them something genuinely valuable in return. 

You may be surprised to discover what interests your visitors. In its recent ‘Turning the Corner’ campaign, Barclays Corporate set up a site to support its series of regional events and business clinics.

Kathryn Taylor, Barclays Corporate’s head of marketing, says, “We filled that site with a wealth of information on every aspect of leading a business out of recession. However, we found that visitors were much more interested in the information on finance than anything else. Looking back, that makes sense – as a bank we’re most credible on that topic. So, we refined our content strategy to provide more articles on financial matters. The site attracted 74,000 visitors with 51 per cent returning at least once.” 

6. Test continually

“Conversion rates on websites are very often five per cent,” says Andy Budd, MD at user experience company Clearleft. “By testing not just for the usability of a site but also its desirability we are frequently able to improve that by 100 per cent or even 200 per cent. The simplest way of doing this is to watch people using it. This will show you where they tend to struggle. Very often they won’t complain – they won’t even realise something hasn’t been as good as it could be. Typically we’ll find 20 to 30 problems by doing just this type of testing. It’s the low hanging fruit that a company can solve very rapidly and produce an immediate uplift in conversion.” 

Boydell at consumer experience experts Retail Eyes concludes with this advice, “Once your site is up, don’t abandon it. Ensure your website is maintained and updated consistently, in-line with or even before the rest of your business to ensure it always reflects your brand and changing customer needs. Continuous investment in your website is one of the best investments you could make. Neglect it and it could be one of the most costly mistakes you make.” 

Related post: Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1

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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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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 discussion from the classic four P’s - now table stakes rather than differentiators - to permission, proximity, perception and participation.

Wow. It’s all over for us veteran marketers 

Unless we can kow-tow to all things digital, perhaps we should follow these Four P’s: Pipe-down, Pack-up, Push-off and Perish.

But, there is some good news…

Although most marketers understand that ‘Price’ isn’t everything, it seems that in the future it will mean nothing at all. I hope we get there immediately. If not sooner…

Now, I haven’t read the 17-page Forrester report, and at $499 for a print-it-yousrelf pdf, I don’t think I intend to. But a man whose marketing views I admire has apparently read it: Mark Ritson has this to say in Marketing magazine:

In my opinion, it’s a disgraceful publication. It’s not that I disagree with many of the points made in the piece; it’s the way it recommends the wanton obliteration of some of the central concepts of marketing as a purportedly sensible response to the challenges of digital marketing.

According to the report, the term ‘brand managers’ should be replaced with ‘brand advocates’. What a load of unhelpful bollocks. We have spent 70 years establishing the term ‘brand manager’ as a commonly accepted and respected function within many organisations. Just as we get there, Forrester wants to knock it all down and replace it with a fluffier, camper alternative.

Blunt, but as ever, right on the money.

My thanks to Lucy Barrett & Mark Ritson for kind permission to use material from Marketing magazine.

More about fundamentals in B2B marketing:

The Man in the Chair – well worth watching on YouTube      Getting real in B2B – what do you represent?

The WOMsta Monsta – Social Media and B2B      Don’t trample the rules – six principles for B2B

Cultivate consistent customers, prevent price pressure - CCC & PPP: the two objectives of B2B marketing

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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 of biometrics – to alter highly-sceptical attitudes by encouraging a conservative, risk-averse market to re-evaluate its opinions of this emerging technology. 

The Biometric Leopards: altering market-perceptions of fingerprint biometrics

Fingerprint biometrics are pretty hi-tech products. Three years ago, the buzz around biometrics was fully-focused on the technology and its futuristic, sci-fi aura. And all the world’s biometric brands positioned themselves in this way - happy to be associated with hi-tech images of eyes and fingertips embedded with electronic circuits and binary code.

No wonder people felt alienated and threatened by the technology…

The concept of the biometric leopards was generated by three objectives:

• move away from a high-technology focus and the market’s ‘me too’ clutter
• emphasise the human, non-threatening aspect of biometrics
• highlight the technology’s ease-of-use for widely-ranging applications 

As with any big promotional event, a fourth objective was to produce a ’show-stopper’ – something that would differentiate the clients from all other exhibitors and generate as much visitor-traffic as possible.

Why leopards? The clients were both South African companies looking to build European sales by leveraging their world-class experience with large-scale, corporate access control solutions in southern Africa.

Take the high-ground. And hold it

The biometric brand in question, Sagem, and their biggest distributor, Ideco, have continued to use biometric leopards and their variants at South African events since their 2006 debut, securing hi-visibility and exceptional visitor-numbers at trade shows like Electra Mining and Securex. They are also used as part of the ‘living’ brand at roadshows, product-launches and even presentations to analysts and investors. 

The fact that bright young women – with only minimal training – can demonstate the brand’s hardware and its associated software at such events has done a great deal to break-down perceptions of Sagem biometrics as a high-complexity technology that only exists in sci-fi movies.

Repositioning across all marcoms channels: building brand-cohesion

As mentioned earlier, the biometric leopards only form part of the overall strategic re-positioning. A great deal of work was also done on re-branding, and a couple of examples are highlighted a little later in this post.

In terms of re-positioning, it was important to build strong relationships with the media – in particular, relevant trade and market-related publications as well as the business press. A key objective here was to position the brand as a thought-leader and trusted ‘educator’ whilst reinforcing the ‘human’ image in preference to a pure technology focus.

Consequently, a range of media was encouraged to broadcast these messages editorially – from specialist security media through to those focused on key industry sectors within the market. Equally important was editorial coverage and support in publications targeting specific management functions within potential end-users: HR, finance, IT, SHEQ and facilities management. 

There was also communication and dialogue with all the other components that go to make up the overall B2B market – VARs, professional consultants, wholesalers, installers, market analysts and industry associations.

And then there was the competition: 

In terms of competitor-strategy, we ring-fenced the brand’s exclusive position as representing the technology’s ‘human’ appeal: accessible, non-threatening and, perhaps most importantly of all, appropriate right now.

Influencing market perceptions: reinforce the brand’s positioning at every opportunity 

To strenghten the on-going, ‘human’ positioning of fingerprint biometrics, images of hands are used as recurring themes in various print-formats – advertising, brochures, posters and banners:

Re-positioning the brand in the widest-posssible market 

Back in 2006, the access control market regarded biometrics as an exclusive technolgy that was limited to ultra-secure applications – associating it with the sort of security solutions that confront Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or something featured in the latest Bond movie.

This perception was so strongly-entrenched that it created a major barrier to biometrics’ penetration of the access control market. Something had to be done to alter this perception – to highlight the fact that this brand of biometrics has ‘universal’ applications:

The concept of ‘universal’ applications for the brand is reinforced by the graphically-positive slogan: ‘Everyone, Everytime, Everywhere’. And it is used repeatedly as a core brand symbol across as wide a range of collateral and media as possible.

Positioning for bottom line results: brands do build business:

• 50,000+ Sagem fingerprint readers now deployed across southern Africa
• Controlling access for some two million people
• Huge diversity of applications – from nursery schools to gold mines
• Ideco is now the world’s largest distributor of Sagem fingerpint readers
• Market share for biometrics in southern Africa: 80%+

After all, the leopard can change its spots… 

More on B2B branding:

Brands are dead. Brands are now more important than ever      Brands build business

The Long Hello: building brand relationships

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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

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 why so with B2B marketing?

Why is so much of it mired down in the mundane, coma-inducing repetitions of obvious product shots, tedious feature-lists and tired, meaningless slogans?

Because it doesn’t have to be…

Original thinking and the bottom line 

An earlier post exemplifies what I reckon is outstanding B2B marketing: Wunderman’s work for Barloworld Logistics delights me because of its relevance, its arresting power on the page and because of the type of response it is generating for the brand.

More importantly, this is what Kate Stubbs, General Manager Marketing at Barloworld Logistics says about the campaign:

The understanding of logistics and supply chain management is really just about logical thinking and problem-solving. This campaign has generated a large amount of direct response for our brand – we’ve successfully boosted brand awareness and enquiries, as well as differentiated ourselves in this competitive market.

Pictures of po-faced truckers standing cross-armed next to big rigs would not have done that.

So, hats off to Wunderman and Barloworld Logistics for producing results through innovation. 

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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 customer loyalty. 

B2B is all about relationships. Isn’t it? 

Yes it is. But which ones? The ways in which a B2B company is regarded by the market as a whole can have a powerful influence on buying decisions. 

The impact of this influence on buying decisions is proportional to the complexity and cost of a company’s products and services. As complexity and cost rises, so too does the influence of the overall market. 

Looking beyond the sales relationship 

Galen de Young of prominent American agency, Proteus B2B Marketing, says, “Growing your existing business with a particular customer or client may very well be about cultivating the relationship, but getting customers in the first place is not.” 

“Relationships with prospects will almost never swing a sweet deal your way. If your ability to get in the door – to get to the table – relies upon your relationship with the prospect, you might get the job if your price is the same as your competitors’. If your price is higher, your prospect might say he’ll give it to you if you can get your price in line. Is that really what you want?”

Looking at the market as a whole: the world beyond customers 

An earlier post looked at the commercial significance of ‘market reflections’ and how these can be positively-influenced by consistent, relevant brand-messages. In addition to direct customers or end users, B2B markets often contain many components:

• distributors and wholesalers
• overall solution-providers
• specialist consultancies or professions
• support and service providers 
• 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 individual components of its market.

Brand-based relationships: opening doors, protecting margins, maintaining loyalty

The idea of ‘The Long Hello’ is to cultivate market reflections that continuously reinforce consistent, positive perceptions of your company. 

And this positioning can only be achieved through marcoms that deliver brand-messages that are relevant to each component of the market.  In terms of the results this approach delivers, Galen de Young from Proteus puts it this way: 

Properly positioned companies don’t have to sell. They merely have to facilitate the buying process.

“If your company is well positioned in the marketplace – if it’s seen as being one of the leading suppliers of specific solutions and a company for which there are few credible substitutes in the market – you’ll not only get to the table quickly and easily, you’ll be proactively invited.”

“You’ll also protect your margins. Profit margin is a function of positioning. Properly positioned companies don’t play the low-price game. They don’t have to. Their prospects see them as having something different. Their prospects don’t have to be convinced; their prospects want to buy.”

Read the full Proteus article

Related posts: 

Recession marketing. No such thing?      Brands are dead. Brands are more important than ever

Marcoms: leveraging B2B’s buying motivators      PR & B2B. The perfect couple

Marcoms: outcomes are the differentiators

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Who says B2B is boring? Not Wunderman…

The brief
Barloworld Logistics designs, implements and manages cutting-edge supply chain solutions that enable their clients to become more competitive, leaner and more effective as organisations.

The South African logistics and supply chain industry is a tough environment in which to compete, and as a result, it’s essential for Barloworld Logistics to differentiate themselves through their marketing, and stand out in the cluttered environment of logistics advertising.

The strategy guiding our Barloworld Logistics campaign was to disrupt a typically conservative and complex logistics solutions category.

The brief was to move the brand identity from the perceived understated, established and corporate image to one that reflects the brand’s innovation, intellectual capital, agility and commitment to solving logistics problems.

The solution
Targeting an intellectually sophisticated client base, we developed a print campaign using brainteaser puzzles to challenge the readers. Some puzzles were chosen for their broad and generic appeal, whilst others were tailored to meet a specific sector such as mining or shipping etc. Whether readers thought they’d solved the problem or not, they still had to contact Barloworld Logistics for confirmation or the correct answer.

The puzzles are specifically chosen to be difficult to solve, in order to dramatise Barloworld Logistics’ belief that “With original thinking anything is possible”.

This campaign completely disrupts conventional logistics and supply chain advertising. It actively solicits readers’ involvement. And in an entirely unexpected way, the campaign brings to life Barloworld Logistics’ value proposition that “With original thinking anything is possible.”

And the results?
The campaign elicited a high degree of senior executive interest and has generated significant response, clearly indicating that it has pushed the right buttons in its complex and technical target market.

Kate Stubbs, General Manager Marketing: Barloworld Logistics says, “The understanding of logistics and supply chain management can often be obscured by jargon. This campaign was a clever way of demonstrating that logistics is really just about logical thinking and problem-solving – and Wunderman managed to do it in an original, fun and innovative way for our brand.”

Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director of Wunderman, Johannesburg  says, “Some of the target audience have taken the challenge very seriously and have gone as far as submitting their own puzzles to Barloworld Logistics to be included in the campaign. One even asked for a copy of a specific puzzle to pass onto his children’s schoolteacher to test her grey matter.”

Stubbs adds, “This campaign has generated a large amount of direct response for our brand. We’ve successfully boosted brand awareness and enquiries, as well as differentiated ourselves in this competitive market. We look forward to seeing a continued interest throughout the rest of the campaign period.”

The campaign was launched in April 2009 and is scheduled to come to an end in April next year.

Wunderman, Johannesburg:
Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director. debi_loftie_eaton@za.wunderman.com

Related post:

Marketing in the right direction: Barloworld Logistics

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line