Fraser Hynes, director of Millward Brown Corporate, explains how B2B brands can connect to customers on an emotional level
What would happen if you asked everyone at your next meeting to name their favourite advert of recent years? Chances are a good few would mention a John Lewis Christmas ad. And how about if you asked for their favourite B2B advert – lots of mumbling and blank faces?
The need to convey detailed information on capabilities and features and a clear call-to-action often comes at the expense of realengagement in B2B ads. While they shouldn’t necessarily reduce people to tears, there is a place for B2B brands to stand out by being more memorable, brave and different. I believe there are six key steps to produce ads that successfully connect on a moreemotional level, and are therefore more effective:
1. Change the marketing mindset
B2B advertising is really not so far removed from consumer advertising, if we consider that the aim of both is to engage a specific group of people with particular needs and existing preconceptions of the brand. Consumer brands do this by evoking a human response from their target audiences – yet we don’t apply that same logic to B2B.
B2B marketers often need to shift their thinking away from ‘communicating to a business’ towards engaging and motivating a response from the people inside that business.
Instead of giving decision-makers facts about a product or service, the objective should be to compel them to ‘feel’ something. This could be to reinforce existing perceptions around trust and reputation, or to make them view the brand its products or services differently. They probably already know what you sell, but do they understand what you really do?
2. Know exactly what you want to achieve
Advertising should be planned – not created ad-hoc – as part of a wider marketing campaign that in turn is tied in directly to the overall business strategy.
Draw up a clear brief that describes what the communication needs to achieve, linked firmly to the company’s business objectives. Who is the target audience? What key message will influence their purchase decision?
Be absolutely explicit about how being more emotive will achieve those aims: for example rather than focusing on specs and technical detail, a company that makes components for IT operating systems can change perceptions by showing how those components will make a business more efficient and give it a competitive edge – and how that will actually feel.
3. Get stakeholder champions on board
Once the brief has been developed, high level buy-in is essential. The business has to be committed at a senior level to changing the way it communicates – which means selling the concept internally.
While a CMO probably wouldn’t ever challenge the finance director on how the accounting is done, people are more likely to feel qualified to share opinions on communications. Decision by committee inevitably leads to diluted messages and more ‘me too’ advertising, so set a clear, focused course and get buy-in to it by showing how a more emotive approach will deliver key objectives.
4. Find – and amplify – what will resonate
Think about what the advertisement can do to evoke a human, emotion-led response from customers and prospects. This should be based on what really differentiates you from your competitors. Trust? Heritage? Innovation? What messages will trigger a purchase decision, or remove perceived risk?
Pinpoint what will resonate with the audience. This lies in the brand, rather than products and services – and our brand equity research shows that meaning, difference and salience (how quickly a brand comes to mind) have the greatest effect on engagement.
B2B businesses are getting better at understanding the attributes of their brand and leveraging them in communications: it’s no coincidence that B2B brands now make up a fifth of the BrandZ Top 100 most valuable brands. The most successful B2B brand in the ranking, IBM, blazed a trail in 2008 by launching ‘Smarter planet’ – a long-term strategy based around an emotive theme, aligned to its core business strategy, set in motion by the top management team and carried through in every communication.
5. Stop trying to say everything at once
It’s likely that key decision-makers already know your company. Buyers constantly monitor the marketplace, so there’s no need to tell them ‘everything’ in an advert. There are cheaper, more effective ways to do this: it’s why you have a sales team, it’s why you hire a PR agency, it’s why you go trade shows.
The role of a B2B advert is to demonstrate the size, scale and scope of a business, its core capabilities and its reputation – and there are more engaging ways to get these messages across than through product points. Tell your target audience, through words and images, what they need to know that will either reinforce or change how they feel about the business and motivate them towards a purchase decision.
6. Test and measure the success of your ideas
Taking a short-term view, testing and measurement doesn’t come cheap. But taking a long-term, strategic view they will enable you to validate the emotive approach internally with hard facts, proving the benefits and reassuring doubters. Metrics should be firmly linked to financial targets.
Information is important in B2B advertising, but it doesn’t need to come at the cost of an advertisement that truly engages decision-makers and motivates them to respond to a call to action. Remember, it’s still a person who signs off the purchase order.
