Improve customer relationships through brand investment

Simon Glynn and Michael D’Esopo, senior partners at Lippincott, offer advice on how companies can use branding to realign their brand and business agenda and create an authentic meaningful identity  

There’s no denying that branding matters now more than ever. While this has become evident in today’s competitive brand landscape for B2C companies, B2Bs traditionally do not invest in or manage their brands to the same extent.

What B2B companies are starting to realise however is that failure to invest in their brands, or relying on corporate-level brand management, is detrimental to business. B2B purchasing decisions are often highly committal, leading to long-lasting customer relationships – the potential to go beyond purely the products purchased, interact with customers and form real connections is highly valuable for businesses.

Companies that treat their brands as a bigger concept – one that transcends being a tool to communicate with customers and instead addresses their experience of the entire organisation – are able to build more lasting relationships with customers and add tangible value to their lives. This process involves reassessing the company’s overall identity, from the individual brands customers are interacting with right down to its internal structure, how it thinks and acts. By repositioning as a partner, rather than a basic supplier, brands retain their relevance and generate long-term value for their overriding organisations. The following tips show how companies can use branding to realign their brand and business agenda and create an authentic, meaningful identity.

1. Build customer relationships

Consumer brands might form emotional bonds with customers, but they fall short of having those regular, real interactions that make up actual human relationships. B2B companies however do have the ability to operate in a more human way and often on an enormous scale, involving thousands of employees. Today’s world of tightly-integrated supply chains means companies demand more from their business partners, including deep-rooted trust. The brand promise is far more about building confidence and a long-term partnership than verifying and measuring activity on a daily basis.

In this context, businesses need to inspire staff – whether they are in sales, service or engineering – to develop genuine, on-brand relationships with their clients on a global scale. While the task may be daunting, its solution lies in encouraging and liberating staff to deliver quicker, more flexible decision-making on the ground and responding to customer needs in the instant. In order to develop more human relationships, staff must be allowed to operate in a human, rather than corporate way.

Ensuring staff are equipped with the right tools is vital. 3M, for instance, gave its client-facing representatives a brand guidebook documenting exciting, actionable examples of the company’s work with the aim of inspiring them to share the brand’s story with the wider world. By kitting representatives with interesting facts and back stories to the products they sell, they are able to explain in detail how the technologies work in action, engaging both existing and potential clients while simultaneously reinforcing the brand and allowing transparency to build trust.

2. Become a partner, not a supplier

As the world evolves to position real value and authenticity at the heart of business agendas, businesses no longer want to be regarded as basic suppliers or vendors, selling on the customers’ terms. Instead, they want to become an irreplaceable asset to their customers.

CA Technologies is a great example of how investment in branding holds the key to businesses repositioning themselves in the eyes of customers, allowing them to become strategic partners, collaborators, and intrinsic within a long-term outlook. While at one time the software corporation marketed single-product technologies, the realisation that its IT department customers required much more enterprise-wide solutions motivated the company to invest in its corporate brand story to ensure the value of its technologies was represented on a larger scale. Going far beyond the product itself, CA Technologies was able to align itself with its customers as a partner through shared vision and offering bigger-picture strategic goals.

3. Align customer and stakeholders interests

Unlike in B2C, the corporate B2B brand is generally in tune with the company’s individual products and services. However stakeholder priorities and agendas in each case can be very different, which means the brands need to be carefully managed to make sure all interests are addressed and accounted for.

Relying on business-level marketing to depict the overall story can work, but the presiding corporate positioning needs to be infused into how the individual business units communicate their stories. In practice, the whole can become far greater than the sum of its parts, yet many companies all-too-often rely on this approach and neglect corporate marketing. On the other hand, companies can also lean too much on corporate marketing in telling their B2B stories and are unable therefore to address the specific needs of its customer audiences.

Those marketers focused on uniting these two differing agendas, whether through attracting recruits, training current employees, reassuring investors, or shaping marketing and sales messages, are able to generate an incredibly strong asset for the business. Enabling the brand to transcend its position as a core message to an entire set of beliefs creates deeper meaning for the company’s overall story.

B2B branding is capable of fostering not just good relationships but lasting partnerships with customers, going far beyond just driving leads and sales, which is vital in achieving both relevancy and value status in an increasingly competitive marketplace. By focusing on what’s happening inside the company, the possibilities of B2B branding to have a positive impact on the outer world are invaluable.

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