B2B Marketing’s annual conference took place last month. If you weren’t there on the day, or if you’d like to relive it all over again, here’s Alex Aspinall’s condensed version
Despite a slightly tongue-in-cheek closing discussion looking at whether or not the B2B marketing rulebook should be torn up, there was very much an air of ‘wanting to get something out of the day’ among the delegates present at the B2B Marketing Conference this year. Days out of the office are not what they once were; they are hard to justify, and conference attendees need to return to the office with actionable insight, not just a few new business cards and clichéd talk of ‘a useful day’.
With this in mind, Joel Harrison, B2B Marketing’s director of editorial and content, and MC for the day, kept his intro brief and handed over to the first speaker, Paul Cash, chief innovation offier at OTM. Cash was keen to encourage marketers to re-evaluate their approach, insisting that business is now being conducted in the ‘crazy age,’ where changes in the way humans communicate are rendering the old B2B methods redundant. Setting the tone for the day ahead, Cash urged delegates to innovate and not be afraid to loosen their control over the brands they represent.
Among the most ‘takeaway-able’ elements of his presentation, though, was the assertion that all brands need to establish a ‘why’. Marketers should be striving to attach a greater purpose to their brands; something more human than the accumulation of profit.
Or, as Cash put it, “The crazy age is a decade of disruption and chaos as the old world of ‘abuse capitalism’ sheds its skin and we emerge with a new more compassionate, value-driven capitalism, where the focus is on the triple bottom line of people, profits and planet.”
Resistance is futile
This sentiment led neatly on to the day’s second presentation by Will McInnes, MD at McInnes Nixon. Embracing change, risk taking and accepting a loss of control is much more engrained in the world of B2C marketing, and McInnes spoke about how a more consumer-led approach could benefit B2B marketers.
Echoing Cash’s advice encouraging marketers to relinquish their iron grips on brand presence, McInnes also argued that embracing the collaborative networks that exist on the web is key for brands in the digital era. ‘Resistance is futile’ was the message. Brands need to ‘adapt or die’.
He concluded, “In simple terms, the best marketing we can do today is what we thought of as customer service or product innovation – everything else is veneer.”
This consumerised approach to marketing continued after the morning coffee break. Stan Woods, MD at Velocity, took to the stage to drive home the importance of storytelling in B2B. Woods was keen to show how, through the use of effective storytelling, marketers can ensure their brand stands out in the increasingly noisy digital space.
Above anything else, Woods was eager to highlight his belief that bullet points, a regrettably common feature of B2B marketing for many years, are neither interesting nor part of a good story. He also advocated dropping the jargon, placing customers as protagonists and – shattering another old B2B-ism – the importance of attempting to engage ‘hearts as well as minds.’ Woods stated, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Social progress
Following a future-gazing session looking at B2B marketing in 2017, hosted by Avaya’s Simon Downs, Keith Hardie from Bird & Bird and Anna Fenten of Sodexo Prestige, the delegates were whisked down to lunch and an hour of frantic networking. From there it was time to head over to the breakout sessions, with those looking at content-driven marketing techniques proving especially popular on the day.
From there, a final dose of caffeine was administered and the day’s hot topic sessions were to begin. The briefs for these were pretty tough, with speakers having only 15 minutes to introduce and provide best practice pointers in their given areas of expertise.
Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, industry head for B2B at Google, was up first, talking mobile. She delivered, at an impressive speed, a plethora of mobile stats that should have given some of the less mobile-friendly brands assembled cause for concern. For example, up to 60 per cent of business decisions take place on mobile devices outside office hours and 58 per cent of people expect web pages to load as quick, or quicker, on mobile devices than a desktop.
Speaking after the event, Tuomisto-Inch summarised, “B2B buyers are wedded to their mobile and tablet devices as key business communication tools, with one in three using them to research purchases and one in four having already purchased for their business on a mobile device. However, six out of 10 B2B companies are lagging behind by failing to assist in the research and purchase process by having sites that aren’t mobile friendly.”
The pace didn’t slacken as focus was shipped to another of B2B’s favourite ‘new’ channels: video. Waggener Edstrom’s head of broadcast and editorial strategies Nick Lawrence did his best to dampen the mood of people saying “since we’ve all got iPhones we can all make videos.” He argued B2B brands should be taking more care over the video content they put out, and, further, that they should be applying the professionally adopted “grammar of video” to all their output (see page 42 for Lawrence’s video ‘how to’).
Rounding off the afternoon briefings was former B2B marketer of the year Andrew Nicholson, head of online at Sodexo Prestige. Chief among his soundbites was, “Social progress is superseding business process,” which succinctly highlights the problems associated with the old-school thinking of B2B times gone by.
Unchartered territory
Though the closing panel debate ostensibly sought to determine whether or not the B2B rulebook needed throwing out in light of the challenges and opportunities discussed throughout the day, it was always destined to be a battle of semantics. What even is the B2B rulebook? We don’t have one.
And perhaps that is the main thing to take away from this year’s conference: all brands are operating in unchartered territory, and doing so with no firm instruction. There are new challenges that require new skills and a brave approach, and there are some elements of marketing that will always remain the same. The recurrent theme from the day, however, was that those willing to try new things were the ones more successfully navigating the challenges of the digital age.
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