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Should B2B brands think more like B2C ones?
Or should we forget the distinction all together...
Mimi Hayton
May 20, 2024
In partnership with
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Spark!
This is your new Guest Editor Mimi Hayton. I’ve been working behind the scenes to help bring Spark to your inboxes for a few weeks and now here I am in front of the scenes to take over this edition. I solemnly swear to do my best to uphold the standards of killer markets and marketing news and views established by Joel and Ryan.
So, should B2B brands think more like B2C ones? I love a good debate, especially one that challenges established norms, which is why I was excited to participate in a panel hosted by Initials CX last week to discuss ‘Optimising B2B strategies with B2C thinking’. Given that my fellow panellists and I all agreed, it wasn’t so much a debate as a chorus, but a fun exercise nonetheless.
We may have accepted the answer as a foregone conclusion on the day, but more importantly, what do you think? Email us or comment on LinkedIn.
-Mimi
The Flippening
In a recent opinion piece for Marketing Week, Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn called out a change in the prevailing Brand winds that I think many of us in the B2B world have begun to sense: B2B companies finally understand the importance of brand. They call it ‘The Flippening’.
The Flippening is the magical moment when B2B businesses realise that brand marketing creates much more financial value than so-called ‘performance marketing’, and B2B CMOs start allocating at least 51% of their budget to top-of-funnel activities.
A more accurate assessment might be that they ‘are waking up to the importance of brand’, but hey, a bit of positive reinforcement couldn’t go astray. For many in the B2B brand marketing trenches, there are still business cases to be made, and much ROI to be demonstrated, before a true ‘Flippening’ can occur. But the case is becoming un-ignorable.
Is it as simple as H2H?
So why is it that creativity, attention-grabbing excitement and storytelling – the emotional levers of effective brand building – have been seen as the purview of B2C brands for so long?
Vivace collaborator Mark Lulsens has a theory and offers an alternative view:
Although the sale takes longer in B2B land with generally more decision makers at play requiring more information – sadly and inevitably leading to drier, less imaginative creative and brand experience – I think it’s as simple as H2H, human to human. That’s it.
People are still buying from people, and people buy with emotions and want smart creative that excites them - true even when buying financial data for machines! 😉
Go big (or fade into obscurity)
One of the key takeaways for B2B brands that came up repeatedly in last week’s webinar was to be brave and lean into emotion and storytelling.
With the increasing democratisation, or flattening, of the media landscape, B2B brands are competing with B2C ones for salience and attention. We all want to see bolder, more creative choices from our B2B brands; in a world of stock photography and overly-functional proposition-focus, there’s a lot of opportunity for cut-through for big, simple creative ideas executed well!
Remember customers are emotional decision-makers regardless of context: we decide first and post-rationalise later. Failing to connect with your customers on an emotional level is failing to connect.
One of my favourite emotive B2B campaigns of recent times was Workday’s Office of Rock Stars which manages to connect with us on our universal emotional response to office/recruitment jargon (i.e. big cringe). There are some other great examples in the aforementioned Marketing Week article.
Conversation sparker
When someone talks about B2B or B2C strategies or approaches in your next meeting – try adding the H2H perspective: ‘How can we make this more human-to-human?' 🤝
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Please let me know if you enjoyed this issue by emailing [email protected] or commenting on LinkedIn. Also if you’d like to see your name added to the illustrious and growing roster of Spark contributors – commentary, opinions, analysis and think-pieces are always welcome 😁
Spark is a production of Vivace Content, where we help our clients navigate what to say and how to say it every single day. Get in touch if you’d like to have a no-hassle consultation about how we can help you too. Have a great week ahead, and see you next Monday.