This is the first in a 3-part series on brand, co-authored by Ledger Bennett (Michelle Nagelberg, Chief Strategy Officer) and TRIPTK (Matthew Sim, Head of Strategy), who are part of the Havas Network.
Ledger Bennett is a B2B marketing agency with expertise across the funnel, including big brand media thinking, customer experience, strategy, digital PR and SEO.
TRIPTK is a global brand strategy and innovation partner helping leaders navigate their brand and business challenges with conviction.
We’re not going to dance around the subject. B2Bs have had a shaky history with brand.
It’s not that we’ve purposefully ignored brand work.
It’s that growing pressures and changing incentives have slowly pushed B2B away from brand towards short-term demand-gen activity.
It’s easy to see why:
- It’s simpler to judge B2B marketing on pipeline and leads than perception.
- To counter long sales cycles, we’ve needed ways to realize immediate gains.
- Marketing is often treated as a lead-generation engine for sales.
And, of course, there’s that big fat misconception at the heart of it all:
“B2B buyers are purely rational, emotionless decision-makers.”
But you and I know none of that is true.
We already know the importance of brand for B2Bs. The evidence is overwhelming.
LinkedIn and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have clearly demonstrated that B2B buyers:
- Prefer brands they recognize and trust.
- Rely on mental shortcuts and familiarity when assessing a product or solution’s suitability.
- Lean heavily on their emotions when making a purchasing decision.
In fact, B2B buyers will pay more for a product from a brand they know and trust than a more cost-effective product with better features from a competitor they’re unfamiliar with.
Diving in at the last minute with demand-gen campaigns when your audience has no idea who you are? It’s not going to work.
Brand work builds memory structures — combatting those long sales cycles.
Brand work makes your brand more salient — so you’re front of mind.
Brand work builds trust — so you’re the easy choice for hidden buyers.
What we’re most interested in is how B2Bs can get the most out of their brand marketing.
Here are four ways our clients are bringing the fire to their brand.
- They’re learning from the best in B2C.
As part of the Havas Network, we’re in a privileged position — we stand where B2B meets B2C. This means we’ve seen first-hand how the best-in-class B2Bs are watching, learning, and perfecting some of the incredible work B2Cs are doing with their brands.
They’re taking more risks — instead of hiding behind stats, features, and figures.
They’re getting emotional — finding the human truth in what their products do.
And, most importantly, they’re playing the long game — building brands that will still be standing in 20 years.
- They’re making clarity their priority.
One of the unspoken challenges B2Bs face is their complexity. They’re often sprawling companies with multiple business units, product ranges, and dozens of teams across disciplines, locations, and projects.
This complexity gets in the way of one of the fundamentals to great brand work: clarity.
We’re seeing the best B2Bs tackle this head-on. They’re getting clarity:
- On what their brand is.
- On what their brand isn’t.
- On who their brand is for.
- On who their brand isn’t for.
They’re also finding out what the actual perception of their brand is — by talking to current/former customers and using market insights. Many of these brands also have niche audiences, for whom they’ll conduct custom research to determine how their brand meets those specific needs.
Clarity cuts out the guesswork.
- They’re ensuring consistency.
Clarity is nothing without consistency. It’s a car with no wheels. Consistency gets your brand where it needs to go — your audience.
The B2Bs that succeed in the world of brand do it by showing up consistently.
They ensure their brand story remains strong and true wherever it’s working (in marketing, customer service, product development — everywhere).
They use their brand to overcome siloes between teams, too. And when that happens, it can unite a business internally and pay dividends in productivity and growth. When anyone in the business can communicate and understand the brand, it will naturally come across at every customer touchpoint.
- They’re thinking holistically.
The rocky relationship between B2B and brand often comes down to a false dichotomy:
“It’s brand or demand.”
This binary approach will always push budgets towards demand work, leaving brand as a “nice-to-have add-on if we can afford it”.
But siloing brand and demand work is counterproductive. When treated separately, both are doomed to fail. Given that we know B2B buyers prioritize trust, demand gen won’t work if no one knows your brand. When you don’t build an engine to capture demand, your brand work will leave you high and dry.
Brand isn’t a luxury, a nice-to-have, that you can switch on when you have some spare budget lying around. Demand isn’t the growth engine, chugging away relentlessly, the fate of an organization on its shoulders.
They’re two halves of the same coin.
When brand and demand converge, B2Bs succeed.
How we can help
At Ledger Bennett, we help the best B2Bs in the world share and grow their brand.
One of the ways we do that is through Converged. Combining LinkedIn data with your first-party data (optional), Converged provides invaluable audience and market insights that can inform every aspect of a campaign — and ultimately, increase its effectiveness.
Keen to find out how? Let’s chat.