If we have learned nothing else from reading the pages of this magazine, it is that B2B marketing is an enormously rich and complex field with its own specialist concerns, issues and techniques. We in the B2B field have spent many years beating the drum about how marketing B2B products, services and companies needs a proper understanding of this environment. There are times that we complain we are often treated as the poor cousins of the marketing world, but that is usually an argument based on the relative size of marketing budgets.
But although size matters, the growth of B2B marketing spend relative to consumer marketing shows that B2B is now a vital and important part of the marketing world. We are in fact not the poor cousins, but close relatives who live somewhere else.
So what makes B2B agencies different and why should you use specialist B2B agencies to help you with your business marketing?
Firstly, the most obvious argument is that B2B marketing is aimed at completely different people from consumer marketing and therefore needs to be constructed and created differently. This is nonsense. The people who buy a high-technology information system for their business still go out and buy Colgate toothpaste. People in business are people at work, but are still people. Most specialist B2B agencies understand this and use it. What it entails is the use and balance between rational and emotional appeals, which is subtly different within B2B than in B2C. A good B2B agency will know what part of the buying cycle needs to appeal to an emotional and brand-centric instinct, and what part of the cycle needs to convey a more rational argument for selecting the product.
As recently noted by Chuck Young, CEO of advertising research company Ameritest, even ads to consumers work best when conveying both emotional (brand image) and rational (brand position) concepts. I would take this further and say that in B2B marketing, the blend needs to be even more carefully considered; good B2B specialist agencies do this as second nature.
This need for emotional and rational balance in the marketing of B2B products is similarly reflected in the way buying decisions are made in business. B2B agencies are always aware of the roles played, not only by the main target of their efforts, but also the advisers, purse-holders, rubber-stampers and other stakeholders who influence the decision to buy.
A good B2B agency will recognise the need to appeal on an emotional level to their main target, but also how to give them rational arguments to persuade their boss. People at work make emotional or heuristic-based decisions, but they do need to appear to be making them on rational grounds.
It is not only the decision making process that is different, but, of course, it is also the frequently complex nature of the products and services compared to consumer marketing. It isn’t always the case that B2B products and services are more complex than consumer products, but they usually are. This means that for an agency to do its job properly they must really understand what the product does.
A specialist B2B agency is practiced in getting underneath the skin of the products and services they are marketing. They usually have the people and culture to not only understand the product, but to really tease out the essential value proposition they need to focus on. Because, of course, it is not enough to understand that product X will do things faster, or better, the agency should take it a stage further and be able to understand what difference ‘faster’ or ‘better’ makes to the lives of the potential buyers of product X. A good B2B agency has the ability to take in a huge amount of information about the product, and distil it into a meaningful and memorable concept that has real appeal on all levels.
This ability to discover the essence of what the agency is being asked to market, outlines a fundamental attribute that a good B2B agency will have: creativity. Readers of this magazine will have seen the pleas for raising the creative standards at B2B agencies, and those who saw the B2B Marketing Awards 06 will have seen how high those standards can become. Good B2B agencies are highly creative. It is creative with a purpose and within a more structured framework than in consumer fields. B2B agencies will look to make that essence (the distilled proposition) into appealing, memorable, eye-catching but relevant concepts. This, perhaps above all else, marks out the best B2B agencies and highlights why you should use a specialist.
I could have highlighted many other differences between B2B and B2C that agencies will be aware of the media, the need for integration, the planning, but the most compelling reason to use a specialist B2B agency is creativity with purpose. There is often resistance in B2B markets to producing original creative work. The best B2B agencies will demonstrate the ability to produce great work without losing sight of the objective and structured framework they are operating in.
