Storytelling is at the heart of all marketing. Great brands have great stories to tell.
In B2B, technology giants Apple and Microsoft have leveraged the almost mythical reputation of their founders – Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – to help tell their brand stories, while the brand guardians for Virgin Atlantic have been their red-uniformed air hostesses.
The Economist, meanwhile, tells its brand story through simple but impactful words that stimulate debate and challenge the status quo.
Currently, B2B brands appear to be enjoying a creative high point – witness Jean-Claude Van Damme’s high-octane balancing stunt in last year’s Volvo ad – as the need for strong storytelling becomes ever-more important to win business.
According to Foster Research, up to 90 per cent of the buying process in B2B is done before a business makes a sales call, so advertising and brand story matter.
However, the tectonic plates are shifting in B2B: the days of brands – such as Microsoft and Samsung – pursuing narcissistic, shouty, sales-led advertising no longer cut the mustard.
Freddie Baveystock, strategy director at branding agency Rufus Leonard, says: “Now the talk in B2B marketing is producing helpful content. This is about creating content that offers more value to the audience and makes their life easier.
“Why mention the brand at all? Customers are smart enough to understand where the content comes from so let’s focus more on addressing their immediate focus [how the brand can help them].”
Underpinning this shift is a societal change and the morphing together of the business and consumer worlds.
Beginning, middle, end
Storytelling is as old as the hills. Cavemen, it is said, told stories through pictures.
The power of storytelling – be it in the Bible or Bayeux Tapestry – has lasted through the years.
It was the Russian theorist Tzevtan Todorov who suggested all narratives follow a three part structure. They start with equilibrium, where everything is balanced, the equilibrium is disrupted, and finally the equilibrium is restored.
This simple narrative formula has served the B2B advertising world until this day – think of the recent Canadian Tire truck made of ice or GE and its ‘Brilliant machines’ ads, both of which follow Todorov’s formula.
That said, today’s media landscape is fragmented and fractured and storytelling can be told through various forms and guises, though observers believe the fundamentals remain the same.
Alicianne Rand, director of marketing at Newscred, the content market company which specialises in B2B brand storytelling, says: “In today’s digital world, storytelling comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be a 140-character tweet, an Instagram post or a long-form video. Storytelling is about connecting with your audiences in ways that matter – inspiring, entertaining and educating.”
Rand argues there is a schism in the US B2B world, between finance brands such as Citibank, Amex and Bank of America, which are showing agility in telling their brand stories compared to the health sector band whose creativity is hamstrung by compliance and regulatory issues.
So does a brand story need a start, middle and end?
Some observers believe in the glare of 24-hour media attention, a single story is no longer good enough for B2B brands.
Andy Nairn, planning director at advertising agency Lucky Generals, says: “Usually you [the brand] have a series of stories you tell over the course of time. Just as one ends another begins.”
Adrian Burton, executive creative director at Lambie-Nairn, the branding agency, who works with O2 in the B2B space, agrees. He says: “To say you have a story locked down is wrong. You capture a moment in time, a chapter within a story.”
One red-flag for B2B brands to avoid, observers say, is their thirst for producing excessive content, such as superfluous digital content in the hope of helping improve their SEO rankings.
Alex Ririe, executive of the branding agency Coley Porter Bell, argues that marketing campaigns, like books, need editing.
She says: Too many marketers think because they’re saying something about their brands, that they’re storytelling. This isn’t the case of course. Marketers should follow the principles of a good book and ensure that content is there and there’s some substance to it.
“Don’t put everything in just because you can. Edit and focus on the important story so it’s easy for your audience and there’s some substance to it.”
Blurring of B2B and B2C
In the midst of the recession, marketing departments realised cost-savings could be made by unifying B2B and B2C marketing campaigns, an option that became more attractive as the two worlds were closing together anyway.
The image of a warm-fuzzy consumer campaign and an emotionless, cold corporate B2B campaign is perhaps a hackneyed and unfair one, but in the case of banks it possesses a ring of truth.
For example, Lloyds TSB – before its rebrand to Lloyds in 2013 – ran separate brand strategies for its B2B and B2C audience. The former was cold and corporate, the latter warm and fuzzy.
Baveystock, who worked on the Lloyds rebrand, said the colourful B2C retail
brand “would not have been appropriate in B2B particularly when scaling up to a corporate audience.”
But because of the melding of the B2C and B2B worlds, Lloyds thought it appropriate to create a single masterbrand, which Baveystock points out helps prevent the “diffusion of brand equity” at Lloyds.
Key to the rebrand, he said, was developing hypothetical examples so different businesses would understand how the masterbrand would work in practice.
This may work for Lloyds as well as Google, which also pursues a unified marketing strategy, but there are obvious dangers in running a unified branding message – not least that B2B and B2C cater for different audiences with different demands.
Burton argues the key is to tiptoe a fine line. He says: “With B2B, you can try and put a smile on people’s face. It’s not all about data analytics. There is an emotional aspect you can engage with. But you can’t go too far [down the B2C route].”
Burton points to the example of The Economist, which he believes has a ‘charm’ and ‘warmth’ in its B2B messaging by carrying small illustrations in its bold, thought provoking outdoor messaging campaigns.
History is the past
A company’s provenance can prove a rich means of telling the world about its core branding message.
For instance accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) has an interesting heritage that dates back 150 years. But PWC chose not to overly rely on its heritage when telling its brand story, which is part of a wider trend of brands eschewing their backstory.
Baveystock says: “It’s not modish. Not many brands do much with their heritage or try to leverage it.”
One key reason for the shift away from brands talking about their heritage is that customers are more demanding: a perfunctory brand message detailing a company’s heritage and what it can offer is not enough.
Beri Cheetham, executive creative director at Arc, the brand activation division of creative agency Leo Burnett, said that increasingly CEOs of businesses want to know the value of what they are getting from a B2B purchase and how it can help the company day-to-day.
Customer friendly
Cheetham points to a client example from Samsung. Its recent marketing activity centred on how it can help businesses. For instance, Samsung created a film from a hospital detailing how one of its X-ray machines was able to help hospitals.
“It showed the impact on people and thus gives a reason to buy it,” says Cheetham. He continues: “Samsung has stopped doing so much functional advertising.”
Like Samsung, IBM has skewed its brand messaging to be more customer friendly in a partial attempt to demystify its products.
One stand out piece of activity was the use of the IBM super computer, called Watson. IBM marketers cannily thrust it into a hit TV show to demonstrate its prowess.
Watched by millions, Watson fought it out on US quiz show Jeopardy against two human brain boxes, to see if computer bytes were better than human brands. They were, Watson won.
In one piece of nifty activity IBM effectively illustrated what Watson could do in a way that people could understand.
Nairn argues that by demystifying techy and complicated products down to something that is easy-to-understand, it helps get buy-in from company chiefs, who may have questioned why the company was spending all this money on a product no one fully understood.
Brands are also wanting to shy away from appearing narcissistic. The Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) recently ran a Twitter campaign showcasing an ILM app, which was centred on how it can help the consumer.
Simon Nash, planning director at Reading Room, the digital marketing agency that created the app, says: “brands do not want to be the showy guy at the party who cannot stop talking about themselves.”
Turning stories into profit
Speak to a branding expert and they will tell you it is not the job of the brand story to create a direct profit for the company.
Rather, it is their job to lay down the brand strategy, the foundation which products and services can be sold on the back of.
However, some brand stories have resonated so widely they have become money-making machines in their own rights.
BMW’s Munich headquarters is one of the most famous landmarks in Munich and houses a museum for visitors to go around, while Apple’s stores are like temples that draw fans to them from the world over.
But these brands are few and far between. For other brands, it is all about showing agility and adapting to changing customer tastes – while keeping the branding message authentic.
Burton says: “A great brand story is not a luxury, it is a necessity. A great brand knows itself, is confident of who it is and how it behaves.”
It is the B2B brands who stay true to this, while successfully tapping into the emotional connection more at home in the B2C world, that will be the winners in the end.
