Title: Moment of Truth – Redefining the CEO’s Brand Management Agenda
Authors: Andreas Bauer, Björn Bloching and Alan Mitchell
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan
The authors are from Roland Berger partnership of strategy consultants. The central thesis of the book is that brands and current marketing have got it all wrong, because they fail to take into account consumers’ fundamental values. I imagine a raft of leading brands might have something to say about that, but there you go.
The secondary thesis is that there are core values (like ‘Quality’, ’24/7 Pro Tech’ and ‘Tranquil’) that are found more or less consistently all over the world. Nineteen core values can be distilled into a smaller number of customer ‘archetypes’. The whole thing can be displayed as two dimensional heat maps which show how brands stack up against these values.
Now you may think the whole idea a bit questionable, and the methodology behind it potentially flaky (as I do), but there is a wealth of interesting examples here, and at the very least this book is immensely thought-provoking.
But what’s it got to do with B2B marketing? Well, there’s a whole section on this. A big case study (on Roche Diagnostics) argues that their medical and related buyers can be represented by a very narrow range of core values, which helped with a major re-branding exercise. The authors have another set of values developed for B2B, but they get confusing when they seem to mix up the values of businesses and people within businesses. And for me, their strongest case study is in a commodity B2B market (chemicals), where they show that buyers can be differentiated by attitude. But they get to this via an ad hoc piece of work, not through the general typology!
You may find the thread hard to follow, and you’ll either love or hate the dozens of heat maps – but do give this a read: it’s challenging and if you don’t come away with something interesting to explore for your business, I’d be surprised.
Reviewed by Trevor Jones
Head of consultancy, Marketing Databasics
