B2B marketing has changed virtually beyond recognition in the last 60 years, and with the pace of change accelerating Alex Blyth charts the evolution, and asks, ‘which way now?’
Later this year the Olympic Games will come to London for the first time since 1948, and the Queen will celebrate 60 years on the throne. In among the running, jumping and flag-waving there will be some retrospection. We will look back onto a now almost vanished time, an era of post-war rationing, when the world was a much larger place and no one had even imagined an electronic calculator, let alone a computer, or the internet, or social media.
It was around that time though that the first seeds of what we now know as B2B marketing began to germinate – some deep in the basements of London’s ad land, many others out in sales departments around the country. So, how has B2B marketing changed in those intervening 60 years? Here we chart the seven ages of B2B marketing.
1. The dark ages
The late 1950s and 1960s were a time of relative plenty after the austerity of the post-war years. At long last people had money to spend and companies were beginning to invest in new marketing techniques that would persuade consumers to spend that money on their products or services. Advertising was becoming more sophisticated and the notion of brand was beginning to take a foothold.
Hamish Pringle, strategic advisor to 23red and co-author of Brand Immortality, says, “This era can be seen as the birth of mass marketing and the whole notion of brand management as opposed to mere salesmanship. At this time Rosser Reeves of agency Ted Bates pioneered the concept of the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ and B2B marketers strove to identify the ‘silver bullet’ that would kill the competition.”
In truth, there was very little B2B marketing happening. In 1962, Tim Hazlehurst, founder and chairman of IAS B2B and recipient of the inaugural B2B Marketing award for ‘Lifetime contribution’ to B2B marketing, began work at Rolls Royce. “I was a commercial artist,” he recalls. “In those days, that was more or less as far as B2B marketing went. We produced sales aids, such as drawings of engines, that the sales team could use. It was incredible how long we took over each one. I remember spending 600 hours on one.”
2. The birth of B2B
It was not until the early 1970s that B2B companies began to look at the marketing work done by consumer firms and consider how they could replicate them. Hazlehurst launched IAS B2B in 1973. “Back then our work was 40 per cent journal advertising and 60 per cent sales support material, such as leaflets, brochures, and slide presentations, as well as the occasional corporate videos,” he says.
It was an industry struggling to establish a foothold in a world of vested interests. “We were never popular with the sales department,” recalls Hazlehurst. “They had been doing things in the same way for years and resented us coming in with new techniques. Then there were the unions. Marketing in those days was labour intensive work, and so almost everything we did was controlled by the unions.”
Nic Ricketts, director of marketing agency 1st Objective recalls just how labour-intensive it was, “We were a specialist agency dealing with B2B advertising for hi-tech customers. All artwork had to be done as typeset strips that were then pasted into position. Any changes meant that patches had to be re-set and pasted over the top. Headline setting was notoriously expensive and only a few specialist setters offered the service. Getting anything done in a hurry was not easy and deadlines were a constant worry.”
3. The data rush
B2B marketing really only began to find its feet in the late 70s and early 80s when global competition began to bite. Rick Segal, worldwide president and chief practice officer at B2B marketing agency Gyro, says, “Back in the early 80s, most of the calls into our fledgling industrial advertising agency began by them saying they didn’t really need an ad agency as they had 65 per cent market share and knew all their customers, but were a bit worried by a new company, usually from outside of Europe, who was starting to take market share.”
He continues, “The long tail of post-World War Two demand was beginning to feather, and companies everywhere were starting to experience real competition, some for the first time. It was at that time everyone began to think about positioning themselves in a then nascent marketplace of global competitors.”
Indeed, it was during this period that the likes of ICI and Dunlop began running large budget campaigns through agencies Ogilvy Benson & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi respectively. However, this growing marketing intelligence and sophistication was seen most vividly – and most importantly – through the emergence of direct mail.
“Direct mail was a revolution for B2B marketing in the early 80s,” says Juliet Williams former MD of direct marketing agency Brann. “It was like digital is now. Brands like Ford Trucks and Barclays Bank led the way in discovering just how effective the channel was at reaching business buyers.”
4. No time for lunch
Alongside direct mail, telephone marketing also became important for B2B marketers. Frank Smith, founder and MD of Context PR, says, “These days people seem scared to pick up the phone even to talk to warm prospects, and yet cold calling was a powerful tool in the B2B marketing armoury not so long ago. Some of the more aggressive telecoms and IT companies built their entire businesses on the numbers game that is cold calling.”
Then there were roadshows. Smith adds, “In the 1980s, the roadshow was king in the world of B2B technology marketing. It was a chance for customers to educate themselves on new technology and a chance for vendors to get in front of potential customers. In those days, the only way you could keep up to date with technology was by readying the trade rags so roadshows were a great additional source of information.”
Finally, strange though it may now seem, the fax was central to many marketing campaigns. Heather Westgate, chief executive at marketing agency TDA, says, “My overriding memory of B2B marketing in the 90s is the continual beep-beep of the fax machine. A well-timed fax with a good proposition could get clients’ phones ringing off the hook and orders flooding in.”
5. The PC has landed
In 1994, Brian Millar, now strategy director at Sense Worldwide, was working in New York on Ogilvy’s new IBM account. “They’d just launched the S/390 mainframe, a brilliant new product that just wasn’t selling,” he recalls. “We interviewed chief information officers at Fortune 500 companies. They told us that five years earlier they’d have bought it but now they’d been reading magazines like Wired and Business 2.0, and were more interested in the Silicon Valley companies like Oracle and Sun Microsystem.”
He continues, “They were worried that if they bought IBM, their boardroom colleagues would think they were out of date. They’d never get another CIO job. Basically IBM was no longer cool in the boardroom. The result was IBM’s ‘Solutions for a small planet’ campaign, and suddenly everyone in the ad agencies wanted to work on technology accounts. Cisco became the biggest company in the world. It was a global technology craze.”
As well as promoting these new technologies, B2B marketers were beginning to use them. Joel Book, principal of marketing, research and education at email marketing firm ExactTarget, says, “The first wave was customer relationship management software (CRM) from companies like Pivotal Relationship, ACT, Onyx, Goldmine, and of course Siebel Systems. Unfortunately, too many B2B marketers bought the CRM technology without developing a CRM strategy.”
He continues, “As the first generation of CRM software solutions gave way to software-as-a-service CRM solutions like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, more and more B2B marketers began discovering email marketing. Almost overnight, existing and prospective customers started receiving more relevant offers and information, and marketers started seeing improved results.”
6. The great acceleration
Since then it has all been about the internet. As Guy O’Brien, head of paid search at I Spy Marketing, says, “B2B marketing changed hugely in the 00s with companies realising their potential customers were trying to understand their offering through the web, as much as they were by telephone or in person. Websites had to go very rapidly from holding pages for brochures to fully-fledged marketing hubs.”
Martin Dinham, director at search marketing agency Guava agrees. “The last decade has been dominated by the growth of the internet,” he says. “In particular, search engines have revolutionised the way in which B2B businesses leverage the web for commercial gain. It was Overture that pioneered the pay-per-click model that Google adopted with AdWords in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history and Google AdWords has given B2B companies the ability to target their marketplace in a way their predecessors would never have recognised, on a 100 per cent performance related basis.”
7. Anytime, anywhere
Today’s B2B marketers are immersing themselves in the many possibilities that social media, video, and mobile present. Karen Trickett, managing partner at marketing agency Tangible UK, says, “The top organisations are using social media for effective real-time customer management. Not everyone is doing this well, as was clearly seen in BlackBerry’s recent compounding of a serious service failure with a customer service failure. B2B marketers are also struggling to work out how they evaluate the contribution of all these different channels – mobile, internet, sales and customer service.”
Increasingly B2B marketing is less about text and more about video. Cisco has claimed that by 2015, one million minutes of video will cross the internet every second. Chris Gorell Barnes, CEO of video marketing agency Adjust Your Set points to Google research that recently revealed 35 per cent of B2B marketers already use online video. He also points to Fujitsu as a good example of a B2B brand taking the lead on this.
Then, finally, there is mobile, Clare Grant, VP of marketing communications at software firm Antenna, comments, “Many B2B marketers are now waking up to the fact that a mobile website might be one of the most effective weapons in their arsenal. Buyers spend much of their time in planes, trains, and automobiles, and so they research and make buying decisions while on the go.”
An established industry
We have come a long way from drawings of engines to the B2B marketing app, but the greatest shift has not been in technology, it has been in the attitude companies take towards B2B marketing.
Hazlehurst recalls the point when he realised it had changed. “We had a major client in the 1990s,” he says, “It was Altro, a flooring company. They spent £1m with us over 10 years or so, and in that time the salesforce there shrank from 100 to 40. They discovered they could get 80 per cent of the sales from 20 per cent of the customers, and so it was far more efficient to pay marketers to profile and reach that 20 per cent.”
He concludes, “Marketing has proved itself in the boardrooms of B2B companies. This is perhaps most evident in the fact that when I started out there were no B2B marketing agencies, and now pretty much all the major B2B accounts are with specialist B2B marketing agencies.”
Social media: A history in 30 seconds
- 1979 – Usenet groups launches – the first ever globally distributed internet discussion system
- 1994 – Geocities launches – a social network/blog in parts – users allowed to create own website for discussion
- 1997 – Six Degrees launches – the first modern social network allowing people to create a profile and become friends with other users
- 1999 – Mainstream blogging founded as Live Journal and Blogger launches
- Early 2000s – Social networking gets into the mainstream with MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn etc
- 2004 – Facebook launches
- 2005 – YouTube launches
- 2006 – Twitter launches
- 2011 – Google Plus launches
(Courtesy of Jonny Rosemont, head of social media at DBD Media)
