Emoticons have rebranded to emojis and the feelings they represent are vital to B2B marketing success. Jessica McGreal reveals why you need to put the emotion back in to marketing
B2B marketing is getting emotional. By ‘emotional’ I don’t mean brands have got overly sensitive or loved-up. The overwhelming majority of marketers are beginning to understand the psychological process behind B2B purchases, and the role emotion plays in it. Simply, B2B buying is not just driven by logic, facts or testing but also by the emotional connection brands create with their customers.
“There’s probably a lot more emotion in our working day than we’d care to admit,” says Dorothy Mead, chief acquisition officer at Blur Group. “Marketers should acknowledge that. Humans have personal goals and objectives as well as business ones.”
Google’s research with CEB and Motista backs up Mead’s belief, revealing a greater proportion of B2B customers are more emotionally attached to the brands they purchase from than consumers. The study showed emotion and branding are interlinked in various ways. For example, if a B2B buyer has a high brand connection with your company they are five times more likely to consider buying from you, 13 times more likely to purchase and 30 times more likely to pay premium.
Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, industry head of B2B at Google, explains: “The reason you can’t have this high brand connection without emotion is the fact that business value messaging no longer differentiates companies. Everyone is demonstrating business value, and thus in order to have a high brand connection; B2B companies need to communicate personal value instead. And if you do that, according to the research, B2B marketing’s impact on metrics like familiarity consideration, preference, purchase and advocacy is doubled in comparison to business value messaging alone.”
So, in an increasingly competitive marketplace facts are no longer enough to ensure your prospects buy; but what does emotion mean in B2B marketing?
Emotional connection
The DNA of a Good Technology Company by The Good Relations Group sheds some light on this. The report reveals what c-suite executives look for when making a technology purchase. Ninety-three per cent of the 145 executives surveyed noted the importance of working with an honest vendor; 91 per cent made purchases when a personal recommendation was given; and 73 per cent of buyers were more likely to be swayed by a strong brand.
All these factors involve companies creating an emotional connection with individuals and brands before they buy, with trust being a key factor. After all, while you can make a snap decision on what you’d like for lunch as a consumer (Sainsburys or M&S?), deciding on and implementing an expensive product or service that will affect your company in the long-term comes with risks. So, buyers need to get it right.
As a result, it’s not only positive emotions that are relevant in B2B marketing, as David Chalmers, marketing director, Europe at Cvent, highlights: “Emotional connections don’t always have to involve the buyer loving the brand they plan to purchase from.
“A focus on getting a buyer to ‘love’ your brand is oversimplifying the use of emotion as there are many other emotions that can be evoked to make a connection with a buyer. You don’t always have to love a brand to connect with it, sometimes fear can be equally as powerful. Taking away the buyer’s fear of failure of making a wrong decision through messaging is still engaging at an emotional level.”
All talk, no action
Although emotion cannot simply be categorised by ‘love’ or ‘hate’, unfortunately, despite the research and increased discussion around the subject of emotion in business, the majority of B2B brands are failing to harness its power.
Google’s Tuomisto-Inch strongly believes: “Companies aren’t focusing on emotional messages and cues enough. While many B2B brands have a much stronger emotional connection with their customers than consumer brands have with theirs, only 31 per cent of non-customers believe B2B brands will provide personal value. There’s a big gulf between customers and non-customers and it’s the job of marketing to bridge that by focusing on the decision-maker.”
The marketing department needs to shift its focus from product proposition to appeal directly to the buyer. This boils down to good creative storytelling.
Gemma Huckle, head of content at Rooster Punk, reinforces this: “Storytelling unlocks the human side of B2B brands, and it’s stories that act as a shortcut to controlling information, reducing anxiety and facilitating confident decisions from time-pressed buyers.”
Storytelling means communicating brand heritage to prospects, but also involves promoting customer stories and finding solutions to the pain points your audience currently face. Yet, in order to make your stories stick, brands need to get creative by utilising the range of content channels available to them.
James Bailey, head of Maxus for Business at Maxus Global, offers an example: “The best application of emotion in B2B marketing I can think of is on the radio. You only have to turn on TalkSport or Absolute Radio and you’ll have your ears filled with humorous campaigns from the likes of Wickes, British Gas, Direct Line, UPS and Tradepoint. I love radio in B2B because it’s all about expression and recall with that medium, it kicks B2B brands out of some of the repetitive tactics employed on social, digital and print where the bulk of B2B spend resides.”
Learning from the best
There are a handful of technology corporations leading the way when it comes to emotional marketing. These firms understand the role emotion plays in B2B, and carried out successful campaigns other B2B brands can learn from. IBM’s famous 1990s tagline: ‘Nobody got fired for buying IBM’ is a clear example of how a simple sentence can evoke trust.
Salesforce is another brand that utilises emotion in its marketing. The CRM giant believes marketing only works when it connects with its audience on a personal level. The organisation focuses on building direct relationships and showcasing customer stories, rather than focusing purely on product offering.
Dan Rogers, VP EMEA marketing at Salesforce, says: “Salesforce is one of the most respected B2B brands because it has successfully tapped into the enthusiasm of its customers and partners around the world. People want to hear from people like themselves. Our customers and partners are our biggest advocates, and we make sure we highlight their passion for the brand at every opportunity. It’s about creating trust around the brand by showcasing real-life success stories.”
These events put the customers centre stage and affect how people feel about the brand. Consequently, this allows Salesforce to create emotional connections with both prospects and customers that would otherwise not be possible.
Meanwhile, SAP aims to ‘Humanise the brand’ and create emotional ties with prospects via sports sponsorships. “If you send out a strong relevant message that appeals to customers on a human level then they will engage with it,” reveals Sian Smith, head of marketing EMEA at SAP. “For example, we heavily promote our relationships with sports brands such as McLaren and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), where our technology has a strong impact on the end result of the team and players.”
These associations allow SAP to demonstrate how its technology works, for example McLaren uses SAP’s tech to enhance the performance of their cars, while WTA uses the tech brand’s products to monitor and improve players’ performance.
A final example of a company using marketing to engender a positive feeling about its brand is General Electric (GE). The business uses its social channels to get creative and connect with customers in numerous ways. This includes sharing interesting facts on Twitter, ‘six-second science’ experiments on Vine and illustrating the power of technology via YouTube campaigns. Rather than promoting its product offering the brand showcases what its ‘Brilliant machines’ can do, while shaping debates around science and technology.
One of its most recent video campaigns ‘GE’s childlike imagination – what my mom does for GE’ taps into an employee’s young daughter’s imagination. The video portrays a sequence of fantasy environments where GE’s machines come to life. The video’s 1.8 million views is a testament to its success.
Martyn Keus, strategy director at 1HQ, explains: “[The] campaign translates the company’s myriad of technical competences into a simple, emotionally resonate brand truth and human story. Blurring the lines between B2B and B2C communication, it makes compelling watching, whether you’re a potential customer or member of the public. And most importantly of all, it leaves you with a positive feeling about the brand, which is what influences most people’s decisions, whether they realise it or not.”
The rational
It’s clear emotion is becoming an essential part of the marketing mix. It allows brands to stand out from their competitors in an arena other than price. But where does this leave the traditional product offering B2B marketers previously relied on?
Janet Benaquisto, marketing director at R.i.s.k, reminds marketers: “I think it depends on what you are marketing and who you are marketing to. I certainly don’t have an emotional connection to where I buy my office supplies (or most consumable products). I do have emotional connections to service providers because of the high level of trust required.”
There is a fine line between building connections based on emotion and getting overly emotional. With the internet ablaze with discussion regarding the subject, practitioners could easily be blinded by the light.
“Emotional response is a consequence of good creative communications, but it shouldn’t be the goal,” argues Scot Mckee, MD of Birddog. “If you want me to save the starving children in Africa, talk to me about emotion. If you want me to integrate your technology solution across my enterprise you’d better talk to me about risk, migration, reliability, productivity and efficiencies, because if you tell me how emotional I’m going to feel about your software, I’ll slap you. It’s called ‘business-to-business’ marketing for a reason. The clue is in the title.”
Marketers need to beware not to be carried away by emotional engagement, but at the same time it would be a huge error to ignore it completely. Emotion has become essential if B2B brands are to stand out from their competitors. Today buyers are looking for companies that can offer more than business value alone.
Consequently, emotional creative can be used to pull prospects in to the funnel, while product offering should play a key role further down the line. These two entities need to work in unison, rather than alone, for brands to reap the biggest benefits from their marketing campaigns.
