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My boss thinks business marketing is the same ...
"My boss built his carreer in consumer marketing, and he now uses his old tricks like branding and image marketing in our business arena. I told him this world is different, but he does not want to aknowledge he could be wrong on this matter. So we are spending loads of money on corporate campaigns with one of the leading agencies, rather than spending time and money on individual relationship building."
Yesterday, I overheard a European marketing coordinator when I was chatting with some colleagues on a reception. It must be frustrating to work for a manager who does not want to see the differences between business and consumer marketing. Definitely when such a boss has no intention to learn from more experienced -- younger -- people.
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Business marketing a new field? Hardly.
But it's very surprising that the obvious distinction between business & consumer marketing needs to be clarified at all. While this difference may be news to some, for me it is more news that the difference is news.
Indeed, business marketing is not a new field. IMP Group has been promoting business marketing as fundamentally different from consumer marketing since the mid 70ies. According to prof. Gosselin (UGent), the marketing population exists of about 60% business marketeers. And yet, business marketing is still being regarded as "consumer marketing for a business consumer" too often.
A lack of proper education is one of the issues here. Many schools and even universities treat business marketing as a specialised course at the end of the master programme. A couple of years ago, I gave a course on business marketing for POST-master students in Economic Sciences who had never heard of any differences between business and consumer marketing before. Moreover, most marketing students prefer the more appealing consumer marketing courses, since that is were you can produce the great ads and campaigns everyone speaks about. When they graduate, these students look for jobs with the mighty brands first -- since they have learned from marketing courses that building a great brand is what marketing is all about. When those marketeers happen to promote into a managerial position in the business marketing field, they tend to take their knowledge for granted and they want to copy their former experiences, often without questioning the fundamentals of their experiences.
We often notice hard working business marketeers who are suddenly being overclassed by a total newcomer who can show a CV with a great consumer brand on it, that makes executive management feel their company will now finally be doing "real" marketing. As an example, I once received the message from a client (marketing manager) who literally told me "sorry, Jan, you did a great job, but now I finally have the management approval to work with a REAL agency", referring with pride to one of the big agencies that promote orange juices and cars in Belgium. A couple of weeks later, he called us in again, since the first monthly invoice from the agency already surpassed our annual turnover with that company.
I feel one of the reasons why business marketing is overlooked, is because many business marketeers are working alone with small budgets and non-sexy campaigns. Sometimes they have to combine their business marketing job with two or more other functions such as business development or even sales. Moreover, in contrast to consumer marketeers that are chasing a 'pure' marketing target like building brand loyalty, business marketeers are working as sales lead generators in function of the sales departments -- the latter being regarded as the kings and queens of the company. Consumer marketeers are often working in crowded departments, with huge budgets for the production of great looking ads and TV commercials that are very visible to both the executive top and the outside world. That is why consumer marketeers often have an aura of importance and even magic around them -- which is often not the case with business marketeers.
And that is why, at each course and workshop, I take a couple of minutes explaining the business marketing fundamental differences.
A candidate for the ultimate lecture on branding is Jeremy Bullmore's inaugural address to the British Brands Group under the title 'Posh Spice and Persil' (downloadable from here).
Although the bulk of examples is on consumer brands ('Margaret Thatcher' being an exception), I cannot help but think that branding principles can be effectively applied in business marketing.
Of course branding principles can be used in business marketing. One of the German universities (I do not remember the exact town at this moment) is even studying the concept of B2B brand personality. They too, however, discovered you at least need different personality parameters for effective B2B branding. So yes, you can use branding in B2B. Only, make sure you first exactly understand why a certain B2C branding principle is functioning, before you copy it to the B2B market.
The main question here is whether branding is the most effective way to spend a marketing budget. Let me give you a more extreme example. I am quite sure a pan-European business marketeer would benefit from a global television campaign in all European countries. It is not sure he would make fundamentally more volume or margin compared to the more guerilla-like approach of direct marketing plus sales and account management, but it is almost certain he would spend a lot more money. Bottomline? Great numbers, yet high budget.
Early 2000, I whitnessed many B2B dotcom companies spend their money in brand campaigns while not even being able to send a clear brochure to interested prospects. That is great branding spent wrongly. They could do with great branding AND great collateral AND an effective sales team. I agree. But they could have gotten similar results with great collateral and an effective business developer and NO brand campaign. Bottomline? Better results, yet fundamentally smaller budget.
On the other hand, as soon as the number of potential customers increases and the offering becomes a commodity, the fundamental differences in business and consumer marketing start to fade. Then, branding becomes more and more important. And much better spent.
As always in marketing, there is no definite yes or no ;-)
That marketing coordinator would face even harder times when his boss is the head of both the B2B and B2C marketing department at the same time. A few years ago I attended a presentation by the Head of Marketing Communications of a large company. Presenting his strategy for the next few years, he impressed his audience with media campaigns, broadcasting, sponsoring large events... Afterwards, at the walking dinner, I asked the B2B Communications Manager where the business clients went to in the presentation. “I know”, he sighed. “I did prepare a few slides. But at the end my boss thought it wasn’t worth talking about”.
My company, with a high-level technical culture, has a long tradition of in-depth relationship with consultants and influencers. It took over an american corporation, twice bigger, that runs state-of-the-art consumer marketing. My new boss comes from that corporation. As I take over a team of business developpers for technical products & solutions, I thought I would have my words about my team's job description.
Answer is actually : "The same Job description should apply across all product lines..." When you know that product lines ranges from mass-distributed product to customer-specific solution, I felt quite confuse.
I constantly wonder how to manage the situation...
I can see the difficulty of making the switch from marketing standard consumer products to highly engineered tailor-made systems.
But a possible overlap is in reputation building and lead generation. For your b2b segment, I can imagine that it may be hard to keep track who's in the market for buying. Mass communication techniques and eMarketing can help to ensure that prospects think of your company when they issue a request for a bid. And it helps if you already have established a reputation as a reliable engineering partners before the sales process.
Ignore and be ignorant of the differences at your peril. To address some of the non sequiturs that have been posted on this subject I would say this.
So-called “older” people are daft to assume that nothing changes just because they had a great success with a certain marketing mix some few years ago.
Equally the so-called “young turks” should not be so naive or even arrogant as to assume that just because something has not happened in the last few months it is de facto wrong or irrelevant.
Now to the apparent distinction between “consumer” and “business” marketing. In my view:
- The marketing mix [and that includes sales, promotion, PR, media, trade relations as well as branding and corporate identity - which are different - pricing and purchasing …] thankfully varies as it would be to say the least hugely boring to be limited to the same old things year after year.
- The basic truths of how brands work are immutable whether applied to Oxford University, a manufacturer of static transfer switches, a fast food chain, a [failing] Bank or the word “democracy” - to name a few very disparate examples to give you the idea of what this means.
- The execution points raised by the original post are details that should be addessed by objective debate derived from disciplined marketing analysis, not from subjective points of view, on either side of the discussion.
- The over used aphorism “The challenge of change” is over used because it is another truism. Ignore the challenge and the ostriches, heads buries in the sand, will neither see nor be inspired by the future. Only embrace the change and relevant wisdom will be ignored at the expense of the effectiveness and efficiency of current and future programmes.
You do not have to be “mature and experienced” to be wise, nor do you have to be “young turk and frustrated” to be foolish.
This is not Nirvana, just common sense. The flexibility that allows adoption or adaptation of the proven and the experimental to our markets [whatever they are] is key to the sophisticated approach that goes at least to standing a chance of developing something effective and efficient.
Which I guess is what we are all seeking to do.
I hear these kind of remarks all the time. I suppose this also has a lot to do with the fact that it is a relatively new field of marketing, with which many managers are not familiar. We can only hope the situation will change as a younger generation of 'real' business marketeers takes over.