If you were hungry (needed to purchase a B2B product or service)

… had $2 (or $2,000,000)

and, I presented these two brands two you:

On the left, Brand A, a most delicious, and nutritious orange (or SAAS solution.…)

On the right, Brand B, an equally qualified product …

Which one would you reach for first?

What if the price for Brand B was %10 higher? Would you still grab it and inspect it first?

If you said yes, welcome to the human race. We’re genetically programmed to reach for things that are more visually appealing as they indicate healthiness, quality, and a whole host of other attributes.

Your B2B brand is no different. Looking good isn’t just a successful branding strategy for the B2C world–people are people wherever they go.

Nothing is more memorable than truth beautifully told. Invest in quality design of your brand and all your brand communications materials, and witness the reaction your audience has to them. Great looking corporate design is one of the most effective brand differentiators you can possess. And relative to its ROI, one of the most cost effective too.

Be bold and prosper.

Whether you’re creating a B2B print ad, webpage, or Powerpoint sales presentation, your goal should be to clearly, effectively, and memorably communicate your message to your audience. Simply “covering the topic” is not sufficient.

Imagine yourself as a teacher rather than  a salesman or marketer, and ask yourself, “If I gave a quiz to this person (or group) at the end of my presentation, how well would he remember my key points?”. Looking at it this way, you’ll want to maximize the memorability of your story, and the single most effective way to do this is to add relevant imagery.

Here’s the science: from among all of our five primary senses, roughly 80% of the information we process is acquired visually–the more visual our communications, the more information our audience will absorb, and as demonstrated in the image above, words accompanied by an image are more memorable than words alone.

Be bold and prosper.

Dear QV,

You guys are always beating the emotional B2B branding drum, and frankly I think you’re full of it.

Look, we’re in the industrial heavy equipment manufacturing business–there’s nothing emotional about that–not to us–not to our customers. What do you want us to do, put pictures of puppies on our website? Yeah, that’ll make our customers go “awwww”,  then pick up the phone to order one of our industrial incinerators. We’re men selling steel, smoke, fire and destruction to men, not Barbie dolls to little girls.

I think we’ll just keep on selling our products like we always have, while you branding boys are hugging it out in the corner.

Signed,

Tank Watson, CEO
Dragonfire Industries

 

And there you go. When we say “emotional” we mean “to move people with a feeling.” But, when Mr. Watson heard “emotional”, he interpreted its meaning within a much narrower definition–like the happiness a daughter feels when she sees a puppy, or other primary emotions like sadness or anger. In the right context those emotions could be leveraged by a B2B brand, but thankfully we have many more to choose from. Here’s a list of emotions from Wikipedia. –that’s a very broad vocabulary to work with, and allows you to do some very refined and well-tuned emotionally based branding.

Here’s my response:

Hello Tank,

Thanks for your letter.

I’m afraid you’ve misinterpreted our definition of “emotional”. Indeed, we wouldn’t recommend using a puppy in your ads–mainly because there’s nothing cute about Dragonfire Incinerators, and as you noted, your customers want to destroy things, not cuddle with them

I’d probably recommend you go with “arousal”, as in “the arousal men feel when they destroy things”–that’s the  emotional core of your brand. Here’s a great example from another B2B brand in a comparable industry. I think they crushed their brand messaging with their series of brand films–moving their audience with an emotional feeling (“hell yeah!”) while demonstrating the power and effectiveness of their product. I believe something similar could be very effective for you.

Best wishes for your brand,

Rick Julian, CEO
QUO VADIS

Whew! That turned me on. How about you?

While this was a mythical interaction, I hope it illustrated the broader opportunities for emotional engagement that are possible. For every company, in any industry, there exists a core emotion that is strategically relevant to your marketing goals. Find out what turns your customers on, then layer your brand messages (functions, features, competitive advantages) upon it–it’s a Trojan Horse style strategy that provides high levels of memorable engagement while forging a strong bond with your B2B audience.

Be bold and prosper.

In their offices or in their homes, people are people.

I’m consistently struck by the absurdity of the notion that “industrial buyers are unaffected by the emotional values corresponding to brands”.

There simply is no psychological research that substantively documents this notion, yet this myth is foundational to the practice of the majority of B2B branding in the marketplace, and is, I believe, one of the fundamental reasons why most B2B branding performs poorly–in a way that leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy that B2B branding doesn’t work.

When one assumes that the B2B buyer enters a hyper-rational mode that eliminates emotional influencers from a purchasing decision, and then creates brand strategy and creative execution based on this premise, the resulting output is assets (print ads, websites, collateral, trade booths, etc.) that are dull and  conceptually uninteresting, and which violate many of the principles of effective branding, and the science that supports it.

One of the challenges B2B marketing executives face is a lack of dedicated research into the psychology of the B2B buyer. As the practice and sophistication of B2B branding continues to grow, this issue will be resolved. In the meantime, let’s use common sense:

Ask yourself which human emotion you haven’t seen displayed by yourself and your colleagues over the course of your career while in your workplace environment. Most of us have seen the gamut–from laughter to tears, from the seven deadly sins to the most noble displays of character. And in exactly the same proportion as we see it in our non-business lives.

Do you truly believe people turn off their “human psychology” and enter a “business psychology” once they enter their offices? Have you ever truly observed a business decision that wasn’t influenced in some large or small way by emotional factors: “I just like this company better”, “I have more confidence in this sales rep”, “I enjoy working with their support team”, “I feel they’ll take better care of us after the sale” … ?

B2B buying decision are not just about pricing and feature/function sets–they’re also influenced by emotion, because at all times, and in all places, people are emotional creatures.

Be bold and prosper.

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?

Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.

Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

One of the greatest predictors of success is the height of one’s ambition.

Ask your kid what grade he wants to earn in math. If he says “C”, you’ll have a good indicator of how hard he’s going to try, and what the likely outcome will be: mediocrity.

Ask a runner what time he wants  in his next 10K.  If he says “to beat my personal best”, you’ll have a very different sense of what his outcome will be: excellence.

The same holds true for B2B branding. What is your aim? Will you be simply be satisfied with a campaign that the CEO approves and wins the general consensus of acceptance in your organization? With a successful launch–where all of your branded assets are created and launched on time and within budget?

How about your brand campaign’s performance? Is your aim to “do no harm” and incrementally grow the brand’s awareness and revenue.

What if you set  your bar  much higher than that?  What if you went “Conan” on your next brand campaign–with the aim of having your competitors trembling in their boots when they compete against your brand, while your sales team walks around with their chests extended like world champions.  What if your aim was to create the greatest branding campaign in the history of your company, of your industry–one that achieves incredible results for brand awareness and revenue growth.

If that was your aim, do you think your marketing team would be inspired to create their very best work? Do think your agency would step up to the plate with its A-Game?

Is it a bit crazy? Well of course it is–there’s nothing sane about climbing mountains.

Be bold and prosper.

I often hear B2B marketing executives assert the idea that B2B and B2C branding are fundamentally different, and therefore the requirements for success in the B2B arena involve a completely different set of strategies and tactics.

In a thousand small ways this is true, but at the macro level, when focusing on the larger factors that lead to our intended outcome: a sale, B2B and B2C branding principles are far more similar than not. At the macro level, our goal as B2B marketers is simple: we want to cultivate awareness among our audience, inform them of our value proposition in a memorable fashion, and layer our products and services with a set of emotional associations that create affinity for our brand–one that tips the purchasing decision in our favor vs. our competitors. Long sales cycle, short sales cycle, complex products or simple products … all of those variables are secondary details in the process of sales persuasion–they inform the process, but aren’t the fundamental drivers.

Keep it simple. Win the big battles, then tackle the secondary issues.

Battle #1: Give your sales activities (people, processes, online and offline) the best stage upon which they can deliver a winning performance.

Here’s your salesman walking into a new business presentation and greeting a potential customer for the first time. In the absence of a strong and memorable B2B brand, he walks in alone.

That same salesman who enters a prospect’s office as the representative of a strong B2B brand strides onto a stage your brand has cultivated, accompanied by a rich set of associations: “he’s an elite professional”, “his products and services are reliable”, “his products and services are innovative.“his company has a rich heritage” etc. Your brand’s reputation precedes his entering that office, and accompanies him for the duration of his presentation. If you were that salesman, which scenario would you prefer? If you were the potential customer, which salesman would you look forward to meeting more?

Your brand provides the stage for your B2B salesforce.

The very same mechanics apply to your products or services.

Battle #2: In the absence of a brand’s employees, how do people feel about your products or services when they see them on a shelf, in a catalog, brochure, website … ?

Without a brand, this product is cola syrup and carbonated water in a glass bottle with a metal cap–just the sum of it’s components.

Your product is more that its constituent parts.

However when that exact product or service is branded, a powerful set of emotional and sensory associations are activated in your audience’s memory. If you had never purchased a Coca-Cola before and were presented both of these scenarios: one branded, the other unbranded, which product would you reach for first? Which product would you be willing to pay more money for?

Your product is delivering a brand performance.

Now you may say, “well that’s well and fine for Coca-Cola, but I sell rackspace servers!” The only difference  between your rackspace server and that bottle of soda (aside from the obvious physical differences) is this: they’ve activated a unique, distinctive, and highly memorable set of associations for their brand, and you haven’t. I could have just as easily substituted a picture of your server for that bottle of Coke and the effect would have been remarkably similar. A viewer would believe your technology opens a world of creative and innovative solutions for its users. And that using your products/services, and interacting with your company personnel might even be enjoyable.

Do you think that kind of positioning would stand out among the dull, hum drum techno speak that dominates the rack server brandscape? If your rack servers can deliver all of the performance and reliability your competitors can, if your technical support is just as good or better than your competitors, but your customers feel differently about your brand, do you believe that might give you the edge you need to inch (or leap) ahead of your competition?

Once you overcome your initial resistance to the idea that the fundamentals of B2B and B2C branding are inherently different, you will have liberated yourself from the shackles that limit your brand’s ability to thrive and win more market share. You’ll come to see an entirely new set of opportunities for positioning your products in highly distinctive and memorable ways that create space between you and your competitors–space that leads to higher levels of awareness and recall, and ultimately, sales.

Be bold and prosper.

Big Ass Fans Is In It to Win It

This, dear readers, is how it is done. At QV we love nothing more than going into dull,  commoditized B2B categories and shaking things up by creating one-of-a-kind presences for our clients that create space between them and their competitors. We don’t do it just because we enjoy being rebellious (though we do) we do it because it produces the best and most consistent results for our clients. We believe in the power of bold B2B branding. Every once in a while I come across work from other companies that possesses that same ethos–work that’s so outstanding it makes me say, “Damn, I wish we’d done that!

Big Ass Fans is one of those brands, and I turn myself in the general direction of Lexington, KY and bow.

12 years ago they were known as HVLS Fan Co. (short for “high volume, low speed.”) and were most likely an also-ran in a the highly commoditized industrial fan sector. Then one day, a bright light went on. Rather than regurgitate their story here, I’ll let you hear it straight from them. Here’s an article in AdAge with their CMO, Al Barlow.

I love it when I come across kindred spirits.

Here’s one of the TV spots from the Women’s Tennis Association’s new “Strong is Beautiful” branding campaign that’s referenced:

The HuffPo article mentioned a critique of the spots by Nicole M. LaVoi, Ph.D. who authored the headline’s question. The core of her critique is that the WTA was inappropriately sexualizing these women by, e.g., presenting them in unrealistic clothes, applying slo-mo, and, in the WTA’s print ads, using gold dust makeup “[that] has nothing to do with tennis.” — basically (in her mind) exercising creative and sexually exploitative license they wouldn’t were men featured in the brand advertising.

As the lead creative executive in a branding agency who has on many occasions used beautiful women (and men) in print ads and film to sell everything from bricks to baggage conveyor systems, I’d like to weigh in on the debate.

1. Humans are sexual creatures. We enjoy looking at beautiful specimens of our species–we find them stimulating, and, on average, prefer looking at attractive men and women vs. less attractive ones. This should come as news to no one.

2. When branding agencies create visual communications, our aim is to be as effective as possible (within our corporate code of ethics) in serving our clients’ goals, so we employ the most effective tools and techniques at our disposal in this pursuit. Toward this end, one of the pillars of our agency’s creative philosophies is: “Beauty is the killer app.”, and we use not only beautiful (sometimes sexy) women and men, but beauty in all her guises: beautiful product design, logos, writing, fonts, graphics … you name it–beauty sells, as well as possessing its own intrinsic aesthetic rewards for its creators and our audiences. Personally and collectively, humans love making and beholding beautiful things.

3. Shakespeare said. “All world is a stage. And all the men and women merely players” I’ll extend this truism to brand marketing and advertising: “All  the marketplace is a stage. And all the brands merely players.” Just as actors don costumes and makeup to assume their characters, so do brands apply their own flattering appurtenances in order to deliver their best performances.

Bottom line, Raphael Nadal shows off his abs during a match by wiping his face with the bottom of his shirt because he knows it turns his female fans on. And it does. So if a marketing campaign for his endorsement brands exploited his abs, his “guns” … his beauty, would it be soft core porn? No, it would be a brand leveraging beauty to its greatest advantage.

Case in point, this comparison between what a real Whopper looks like, and what a brand stylized Whopper looks like. You and I have never been handed a Whopper this beautiful at a Burger King–it is an idealized representation of the Whopper.

Any agency that even recommended featuring the photograph on the right would immediately  be fired by the client. Why? Because we were being too authentic? Weren’t keeping it real enough? No, our clients don’t necessarily want real, they want sales, and assembling all the components of an actual Whopper to their highest visual potential basically kick’s “real’s” behind.

And I’m as comfortable with the ethics of that approach as I am with the ethics of the “Strong is Beautiful” campaign.

(continue reading beneath the burger porn)

All the branding world is a stage.”

Now, American Apparel …  that’s another Oprah.

What do you think?