The B2B More Human principles are a great place to start – each firmly grounded in our central premise. They’re a practical framework for building (and maintaining) a flourishing brand.
Only by truly understanding your audience can you deliver meaningful solutions to real problems. That way, you can present products, services or tools as solutions to human problems. And that makes them interesting.
The B2B brands that talk about themselves sometimes survive. But the ones that talk to their audience almost always thrive.
Digital preservation software
Active digital preservation
Manage content and metadata
Secure cloud storage
Catalogue & API integration
Automatically keeps every file alive in future-friendly formats
The confidence to access your files in their original state, no matter how old
Protecting the world’s cultural, economic, political social memory
Finally, jump to a powerful emotional truth, in this case about the importance of global memory.
You can read more about the Preservica story here. And if you’d like to try walking your brand up the benefit ladder, we’d be more than happy to help you along the way.
People crave authenticity – and the pandemic has turbo-charged this. CEOs now speak from bedrooms, as well as boardrooms. Meetings are paused by Amazon doorbells and pets pop up for unannounced cameos. In short, we’ve shown that we’re all basically the same behind the veneer.
What can B2B brands learn from all this? Ultimately, that vulnerability and imperfection breeds trust. Bottom line, an audience that ‘feels’ you will always be more likely to part with their pennies. And if you keep on being authentic, they’ll keep on investing in you.
The results were fascinating. Nearly two thirds of respondents preferred the imperfect cookie. It looked more appetising. More delicious. More real.
And that’s something that we in B2B marketing can really learn from. We often fall into the trap of thinking that we have to be super slick, shiny and corporate. But more often than not, it isn’t what people want from us. Something we were very aware of, when we recently helped Pepper Money develop a new way of talking to their customers.
Because we’re human, we mainly make decisions based on emotion – and often, the bigger the decision, the more we rely on our heart. But we’ll always use our head to rationalise these decisions.
The aim of the game is to make your brand stick in people’s memories, give them reason to consider it and, when the time comes, serve up the facts they need to decide if it’s for them. B2B brands need to capture both their audience’s heads and their hearts – first with an emotive story that creates desire, and then with the factual bones that seal the deal.
Our recent work with Coventry Building Society shows how balancing the head and the heart can help a business grow sustainably, over the longer term.
The B2B sector is blighted by ‘blanding’. When ‘bland’ sets the tone, it takes bravery to stand apart. The great news is that bravery is what people want. And with creative quality cited as being able to multiply profits by a factor of 12* (making it the biggest opportunity for competitive advantage), it’s what brands need to be doing.
The best B2B marketing doesn’t just educate, it entertains. Because when somebody’s entertained, they remember you. And with B2B buyers ‘shopping’ just 5% of the time, it’s hard to argue that anything beats being remembered.
* Source: WARC / Accelero Consulting
Within what’s a very niche space – and with very strong category conventions – the band Party Cannon created a real stir by daring to be different. And we think that rocks.
It’s something we can all learn from in the B2B space – and a lesson we took to heart when we recently developed a new identity for BrookStreet des Roches.
If you’d like your brand to build more lasting relationships with your customers, it might just be the best 30 minutes you’ve spent in a while.