Category: B2B Marketing

Mediocre brands sell ‘product’. Great brands sell ‘value’.

Alex M H Smith, strategist

B2B Marketing

Bravery. A B2B marketing poem, by Brian Macreadie

It’s lonelier on the road less travelled
It’s isolated on the open sea
It’s scary walking all alone
Pioneering requires bravery

Because it’s harder finding discoveries
where many have trampled before
If we aspire to make breakthroughs
we must venture and explore

And just as fresh discoveries
are best found on new terrain
It’s only fresh marketing tactics
that bring extraordinary gains

You can’t win hearts and minds
with marketing that’s boring
Trying evocative tactics is
both more fun and more rewarding

Plus repeating tired old formulas
is also forgettably unfulfilling
And it almost certainly won’t
get our target audiences clicking

We’re each contesting competitive ground
and must carve out a distinctive place
But there’s more room at the margins
Pushing boundaries creates space

And finding space from others
is the way to get us seen
It’s easier standing out when
you’re not one of the sardines

So it’s not risky being different
It’s risky not standing apart
Being distinctive’s not a brave move
It’s simply being smart

So go where others aren’t
and try what others won’t
Experiment more than rivals
and do the things they don’t

Let’s take the road less travelled
and sail on open seas
Let’s try doing something special
and reveal wondrous opportunities

B2B Marketing

If you want to positively influence behaviour…

The UK Government’s Behavioural Insight unit developed a simple ‘EAST’ framework for any policymakers and communicators seeking to influence positive behavioural change. Communication and actions should be:

Easy (to follow or adopt);

Attractive (i.e. of benefit to the customer);

Social (i.e. others do it, or it benefits others); and

Timely (i.e. actionable now)

B2B Marketing

Marketing strategy is about working on the edge

“A good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. It is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge. Only there are found the opportunities to keep us ahead of rivals. There is no avoiding it. The uneasy sense of ambiguity you feel [when developing strategy] is real. It is the scent of opportunity … Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true. It is a dumb request … A good strategy, in the end, is a hypothesis about what will work.

In a world of change and flux, doing more of the same is rarely the right answer. In a changing world, good strategy must embody some ideas or insights into new combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities. The problem with dealing with strategy as a crank-winding exercise is that systems of deduction and computation do not produce new, interesting ideas, no matter how hard one winds the crank … stating a new theorem is a profoundly creative act.”

Richard Rumelt, strategy expert

B2B Marketing

The key to selling? Ask questions.

“The key to selling is to – step one – find out what are your clients needs, values, what pain are they looking to resolve … you’re here to fill that need. If you just go out and try and sell something to someone, you’re basically just saying ‘I don’t give a shit about them’ and you’re just gonna ram something down their throat.

Jordan Belfort