One piece of current marketing wisdom I am increasingly sceptical to is the belief that B2B marketing is, at heart, the same as B2C – now so widely stated by marketing experts that it has become something of a cliché.
To quote Mark Ritson’s article about B2B and B2C: “marketers need to recognise that there really aren’t that many differences in selling a service versus a product. Or targeting companies rather than people.” His typically amusingly argued point is that they are the same at a fundamental level and that the differences are relatively cosmetic.
The line runs roughly as follows: good consumer marketing uses a mixture of brand and activation to appeal to human psychology, businesses are also staffed by humans, and ultimately therefore marketing to businesses is still just marketing to humans. It highlights the necessity of focusing on experience, noting that expectations are going to be set by experiences business buyers have in their personal lives.
This is usually made as a corrective against the natural tendency for B2B marketing to be more rational and feature-focused. The point it is trying to make is that business buyers are just as sensitive to brand, as the old adage that “nobody ever got fired by buying IBM” illustrates. With major business purchases, large sums of money and time are at risk so going with a brand that is trusted by the market is much more crucial than when buying a coffee.
I think this debate misses a key piece of nuance, however: in businesses with more than a few employees there is a fundamental divorce of decisions from consequences, either positive or negative. If I choose to buy a nice coffee, I get to enjoy the coffee, if I buy a bad one I don’t enjoy it, and if I don’t have one at all I potentially have to find a way of tolerating a morning without caffeine.
In his article, Ritson does note that buying processes in B2B are different, but doesn’t explore the unaligned incentives as a fundamental challenge which no B2C marketer will have to face. While great marketing might win over the eventual product user, the actual decision-maker(s) may have a different set of priorities.
In a business, the person who approves a purchase will often be held responsible for it going wrong, yet should it be a success, the benefits of it going right may accrue elsewhere. Nor does the decision-maker feel the opportunity cost of it not being done at all. In theory, a well-run organisation should be able to build procurement processes that account for this, but in practice many don’t.
This introduces innumerable additional links in the chain where a sale might fall through. The important “marketing” may actually be something you have limited input into: a conversation between the intended user of a service and the person holding the purse-strings.
There’s no doubt that B2B marketing can be dull and could draw more from B2C in terms of customer experience, humour and emotion, as some great recent campaigns have shown. But just trying to do more entertaining and emotive advertising will mean nothing unless you also empower your customer to win over their internal audience.
