Joel Harrison: Are we all agreed that branding is critical and one of the key issues for B2B companies at the moment?
Mark Allatt, Deloitte: I think it is, and that non-marketing management is starting to recognise this fact as well. It has gone from no one at Deloitte even knowing what the ‘B’ word was four or five years ago, to now being one of our three most important strategic priorities. Everybody uses the brand, and some even use it correctly, which is a fascinating transformation in a fairly traditionally business.
Douglas Greenwell, G4S: But there’s still an awful lot of B2B companies out there who think branding’s about the colour splash that goes on the stationery and it’s no more than that. It always leaves me slightly nervous when people talk about rebranding, because it’s like ‘oh here’s an opportunity to have a new logo’, and that is still a mindset in B2B. I was encouraged by your point that, in the service industry in particular, your brand is your people.
Mark Allatt: The one thing that actually got us to focus on brand was getting everyone behind something they could identify with. If we hadn’t made the decision to start with the visual and move through the verbal into the behavioural, then people wouldn’t have started moving in the right direction. They saw the simple benefits of staff turning up for a meeting with a client, putting their business cards on the table, and looking like they’re from the same organisation. That’s a big step forward. You can then move onto the really important issue, which is making sure they’re delivering the brand.
Douglas Greenwell: That I don’t disagree with. People are very important, you’ve got to walk the talk, otherwise it just destroys everything.
Ana Bolitho, Voca: But I think your staff do want to be proud of the design. The quality of the design work is important. Because if you’re saying ‘branding matters and marketing matters’, and you give them something their kid could have done at home on the computer, they’re going to go ‘god, now we’re really writing marketing off’.
Mark Allatt: What happens is 90 per cent of effort goes on what the logo looks like, and only 10 per on getting people to be consistent. That’s the wrong way around.
Declan Bermingham, Neopost: Isn’t a key question whether the brand is the start point, or is it the end point? For Neopost it is the end point, and the start point is getting consistency, having the right offers, the right messages, and that’s articulated by the brand. For B2C it’s relatively easy because you’ve got larger budgets to do that, but in B2B, unless you’re affiliated with a consumer brand or put money into a football team that wins the FA Cup, it’s very, very expensive.
Mark Savage, Colt: I agree that your logo is important, but it’s got to have cut-through. I think there’s growing maturity in B2B businesses around brands, to the extent that staff have to know what you stand for as an organisation. Put aside the logo and design. They are an articulation of what you stand for. It’s what your goals are, your passions, your vision and mission, and I do slightly disagree with the point that brand is the end point or the start point, because to me it’s the whole thing.
Sheila O’Brien, BT: In many cases it’s heroic failures that encourage companies to take branding seriously. I was at IBM when Lou Gerstner arrived, who is a believer in brand. Leadership from the top is what drives change. He simply ripped out everything that didn’t conform. BT has had heroic failures, very visible, very embarrassing, but inch-by-inch they have transformed themselves. What’s a critical ingredient? Leadership. Ben Verwaayen is a total believer in brand. BT and IBM were completely sales-led companies when I joined them, and they transformed themselves to marketing-led companies. I came to BT because I’m a glutton for war. I’ve seen the movie, I know how it will end!
Joel Harrison: To what extent are the vast majority of companies out there taking branding seriously, and what is motivating them to do it, or not to do it?
Karen Wilson, Yahoo: I deal with SMEs on a regular basis, and an SME – as we all know – can range from a one-man-band up to 400 people, depending on your definition. The difference between them and larger companies is that they don’t necessarily call it branding. Yahoo in Europe doesn’t have the head of brand, or a brand director. In SMEs there are people that own the brand, in different ways at different levels, which you can argue works in some instances, and in others you can certainly argue against it. But is the focus about branding specifically? No it’s not. Is it about awareness and education, not necessarily what products the business owns, but about what it is trying to achieve? Yes, it probably is.
Ana Bolitho: Branding can give you an impression of trust, which is why it’s quite important for some B2B businesses, because it might give you the opportunity to look larger than you are.
Mark Savage: The B2B marketplace is an ever increasingly sophisticated and crowded place. How you get cut-through is quite frankly by providing an outstanding customer experience. What is your chief asset for associating your company with that outstanding customer experience? It’s your brand.
Declan Bermingham: The customer experience should be the starting point for branding the articulation. There’s something like two million businesses in the UK, of which there’s probably about 600,000 that you would classify as B2B type businesses, and in most there will be one key individual in charge. And these guys are the brand. The challenge is to hang onto that spirit when they become larger. Kodak and Sony have managed to hang onto the vision of their founder.
Sheila O’Brien, BT: How do you keep management going? One of the key things to do, and I learnt this at IBM, was have a valuation done for brand value. It was just done at BT, and it was valued at about £8 million. That gets the board’s attention.
Joel Harrison: When you look around the B2B space, does what you see impress you in terms of branding, or do you think ‘oh gosh, they shouldn’t have done that’?
Ana Bolitho: It’s not so much the branding, but advertising is shocking in many cases – I know B2B Marketing has a section on it. Much of the advertising that goes on doesn’t seem to be thought out. Maybe the branding isn’t so bad, but the execution to achieve the sales goal is.
Douglas Greenwell: That’s not just in advertising. The challenge I face, day in, day out, is that the thing that destroys the brand is the sales channel. A couple of years ago I spoke to them about value propositions, and the response was ‘what language are you talking?’, but they’re slowly getting it. Sales wants a simple life, in order to sell things at the lowest common denominator, and that’s not always what the value proposition’s all about.
Mark Allatt: I’d say it’s also about agency management as well. How many times have you had an agency coming to pitch to you, you’ve provided them with all the brand guidance they should need, and they say ‘well we read and looked at this, but, we’ve come back with something completely different’? At that point I kick them out, and tell them if they come back in a week and actually respond on the brief, then I might listen to them.
Joel Harrison: What are the challenges or obstacles in becoming brand-centric? Is board-level buy-in crucial in all cases?
Mark Allatt: I think it absolutely has to be. Within six months of our new CEO coming in, we’d actually moved to a single Deloitte logo in 150 countries and we knew what our brand stood for. It would have happened anyway, but not in that time scale if we hadn’t had the commitment.
Ana Bolitho: Another problem is branding being treated like a project. It has to be sustained. I find it quite easy to get senior management very excited about the rebranding project, and they can see their role in it, and the benefits of getting staff tied into new values, but then ‘business-as-usual’ kicks in. Brand can’t just drop off the agenda.
Mark Savage: We’re tiptoeing around the edges here. Most of the obstacles relate to people. Your brand has numerous touch points, from the moment somebody walks into your reception, to the first sales visit, to the moment they receive their first bill, to when they interact with the customer services person, to an installation person. It’s not just salesmen, every single part of the organisation has to be in line with what the brand messages are, and the whole customer experience. Once you’ve got that right, you can then overcome some of the obstacles.
Michael Avis, Sun Microsystems: The biggest single obstacle would be managing the disconnect between the brand and the business. If you allow people to believe that branding is just about an identity system and a logo the obstacles are going to be everywhere. But if you’re able to show that branding is having a direct relationship to your success within the marketplace, through an understanding of what the company stands for, you can actually win business because you have an edge that people have an emotional attachment to, then you’re home and dry.
Ana Bolitho: I’d be quite interested in what people think about the quality of B2B marketing staff, because obviously getting your brand out there successfully relies on them. One of the things we struggle with at Voca is getting marketers who want to understand the market that we’re in, because it’s about payments, and European legislation, and it’s not that exciting.
Michael Avis: I want my team to be responsible for their segment of the market. My perfect segment marketing manager is somebody that has a passion for the segment, i.e. they feel the same about it as they do their favourite sports team, so they stick up for it, and they desperately want to bring value to it, because they have an affinity.
Joel Harrison: What are the steps and processes to which an organisation must adhere to ensure it is brand-centric?
Michael Avis: You could do an audit of all your touch points. I think that it would be shocking for most of us.
Shiela O’Brien: Training in best practice is essential.
Ana Bolitho: When we rebranded one of the things that worked best was conducting workshops that made the values come to life. It focused on things like ‘how does this influence your behaviour?’ ‘ What does that mean for the future?’ It was better than just sticking up a poster with six words on it and saying ‘Now we’re new’.
Karen Wilson: We’re doing global webinars with the new brand and we’re having people vote on various aspects of it, and they love it. The last one will be tomorrow for the US, but we have done 23 countries really cost-effectively.
Mark Savage: Those companies who have good brands also have outstanding communication skill-sets. They have proper messaging, and a cascade of communication to the right people. Branding is two way – not just downwards.
Michael Avis: My issue is the connection of either brand or marketing with the business and making it absolutely central. We touched on measurement as a way of proving the point, but it’s also where you assign accountability. Marketing should be accountable for the business pipeline, and the sales function is responsible for converting that into revenue. The moment you have accountability for a pipeline, it changes your outlook completely.
Mark Savage: You’re talking about winning customers, but when you’re talking about retaining customers,every single touch point is as important as every other one. One bad customer experience and that customer could walk. If you’re talking about your pipeline and revenue, retention’s more important than acquisition.
Sheila O’Brien: We have a measurement now called Active Consideration, and that’s fundamentally based on brand. In our EMEA markets, where we’re a challenger brand, how would we get companies to put us on the Active Consideration list? That’s the most meaningful metrics marketing has that sales and the board really care about.
Douglas Greenwell: Companies should just keep things simple. I see too many examples where people get carried away, and come up with six, seven, eight, nine or 10 values , thinking ‘we’re about all these things aren’t we?’ The reality is most people remember only a couple.
Mark Allatt: Another key challenge is boredom. There are far too many brand managers who come in and change things because they are bored or, for the sake of it.
Ana Bolitho: It’s a very different experience internally than it is externally. You think ‘well we’ve been rolling out the same old message for six months, our customers must be tired of it’… But they may have only heard it twice.
Mark Allatt: I’m not saying change is a bad thing. Look at the way the Shell brand has evolved over the years, as personified by their logo. That just represents the brand as a whole. It is recognisably Shell, but it’s completely different today than it was 80 years ago.
Shiela O’Brien: Some companies do research to reaffirm their existing beliefs, so you can ask any question and get the answer you want. There is a tendency for us to fall in love with something we’ve built.
Mark Allatt: We can learn from our B2C cousins in that. They’re very good at monitoring the meaning of brand to people, as opposed to what the brand is saying and people’s interpretation changes, and they track it, day-in, day-out. One day someone from Deloitte is buying a solution to a particular problem they’ve got, and the next day they’re in Tescos doing their shopping, where they will be having a very, very carefully managed experience.
Joel Harrison: Do we think the wider B2B market is raising it’s game in branding? Are things getting better or not?
Mark Allatt: Better slowly.
Douglas Greenwell: The marketing in B2B generally is a lot better to what it was, but we’ve still got a lot to learn about brand from our B2C customers.
