In B2B or B2C, don’t ignore the brand

MARK RITSON

MAY 27, 2019

The Australian

The names Les Binet and Peter Field should, by now, be familiar to almost every executive working in media and marketing.

The “godfathers of advertising effectiveness” have each built a global reputation for understanding what does and does not drive advertising success and profitability.

But up until now their work has been limited to the glitzy world of consumer marketing, or B2C as it is more commonly known, where a single organisation like Gillette or Vegemite might target millions of end users. Their work has not looked at or been applied to the staid category of B2B marketing where companies like Visy or PwC attempt to target large organisational clients.

But all that changed last week when the two authors presented a new study that specifically examined the effectiveness of B2B marketing campaigns. The study was commissioned by LinkedIn which, unlike Facebook or Instagram, derives far more of its revenue from the B2B world than from B2C.

And the broad summary of this new work, based on an analysis of hundreds of business-to-business campaigns, is that the lessons of B2B are largely identical to that of B2C. That might sound like a disappointing conclusion but it is no such thing. Almost every experience I have ever had with B2B marketers dwells on the sizeable differences with B2C and why “it’s not the same in B2B”. Well, according to the godfathers of effectiveness that statement turns out to be almost completely bogus.

And the similarities are not necessarily a good thing. Just as Binet and Field have lamented the short-term, efficiency focus of marketers in B2C companies, they have found a similar level of impatience and myopia afflicting their B2B brethren too.

Famously the duo prescribed a 60/40 rule for B2C marketers in which 60 per cent of the total marketing budget should be invested in long-term brand building, with the remainder spent on shorter-term sales activation. And while their analysis of B2B reveals a slightly more balanced prescription — they recommend 54 per cent of spend should go to long-term branding — it still suggests that most B2B organisations are spending far too much on their sales teams and short-term promotions and not enough on building brand.

The duo highlighted that ­ignorance with an astonishing quote from one senior B2B executive: “We don’t have marketing run by marketers. We’re engineers. And we work on growth. Branding is really that emotional drizzle that you guys put on top.”

It’s a terrifying quote but symptomatic of a B2B industry that sees marketing and branding as fluff and sales as the place to focus their time, effort and investment on. In reality — as Binet and Field demonstrated ably last week with data — you want to build a B2B brand to target decision-makers first and then harvest those sales with suitable activations and sales calls.

As with their work in B2C, the duo also poured a lot of cold water over the idea of differentiation. They find that the most important challenge for B2B marketers is to keep their brand salient — always in the awareness of organisational decision-makers. While it’s important for a brand like McKinsey to stand for certain things, it is unlikely those things will be very different from Bain or BCG. The key in B2B is to be in the thoughts of target clients as much as possible. Maintain that prevalence and your marketing will perform twice as well as campaigns that aim to deliver a specific message of differentiation.

And there was another shock in the data last week. While most B2B marketers are careful to segment and target only specific customer groups, data from Binet and Field suggest that the best returns are achieved by reaching every firm in the category with broad reach and being “always on message”. The nuance of this lies in the idea that a successful B2B marketer should be running two very different kinds of marketing campaign each year.

The first is brand-based and does not focus extensively on product messages. Instead, the two or three key values of the company should be repeatedly communicated in a way that constantly speaks to all potential B2B customers. Both IBM and Accenture have proven to be masters at this kind of campaign in the past. Big message, big idea communication using mass channels such as news media, outdoor and ­sponsorships.

The second campaign should be more targeted with different products and different messages aimed at very specific segments of the B2B market. There will be more of these campaigns and they should be measured on their ability to directly generate sales. These campaigns will more likely use digital media like LinkedIn which can very specifically identity and target B2B decision-makers and will work in direct alignment with the sales force via local events and sales aids.

At the moment most B2B companies in Australia focus on this second type of campaign and ignore the longer-term, brand-based options. They do this because they look at the short-term and the immediate ROI of marketing campaigns. But ROI is a stupid, stupid measure of marketing effectiveness because it only looks at short-term impact. The key lesson of the effectiveness research of the past five years is that long-term brand investments actually prove significantly more valuable when run in tandem to the sales activation campaigns.

Whether the B2B marketers of Australia will pay attention to this new work from Binet and Field is a moot point, however. In almost every B2B company the marketing team are kept in a very small box and only allowed out for special occasions. The sales team runs the business and, crucially, has the final say on what does and does not work when it comes to marketing. Selling them on the idea of taking resources from their short-term campaigns and headcount to invest in brand would appear beyond everyone. Even the godfathers of modern advertising effectiveness.