B2B Trends -- What a Difference a Year Makes
The financial crisis has had a big impact on marketing and advertising resulting in a realignment of priorities – a point emphasized by the ISBM in a recent presentation by their Executive Director. The Institute has monitored business marketing (and research) trends since the 1990’s and projects out 2 to 3 years – but the ISBM recently re-visited and revised the 2008 study – resulting in the emergence of new priorities (and downgrading of others).
What's hot now (keeping both your short and long term focus and compiling the right customer profile)
-Keeping tomorrow in mind – the advice is to build and enable an organization capability to stay focused on current issues and but don’t forget about investing in the future.
- Discerning the right customer profile for your organization – making the hard choices and identifying the “value” versus “price" versus "commodity buyers" versus the “pigs” (the latter being comprised of the high maintenance/low profit guys). This involves making hard choices about your customers. Marketers may also have to segment customers (and related offerings) more aggressively.
Still hot, kind of (the need to better understand and measure customer needs)
-Understanding and translating needs – getting at those special “insights” that will provide true competitive advantage (if only market researchers would use the right tools).
- Better measurement – defining and documenting “value” in business markets (from the customer’s point of view) and constructing better B2B marketing metrics to achieve more accountability.
Not so hot anymore (three issues have dropped off the radar)
-Competing globally (especially with China)
-Improving the rate and speed of new product offerings.
-Selling the “C-Suite” (making the case for marketing with top management).
Observations and comment
The ISBM B2B trend analysis is something that many B2B marketers and researchers follow religiously but there are some nagging questions which come up consistently over time.
Value, value, value
This term first appeared in business marketing research about 15 years ago; everybody wanted to define and understand the meaning of "value”. Some academic researchers have even reduced “value” to an equation. In the B2B world “value” can be an overused term and is often confused with costs and pricing. In reality “value” is just a code word for “benefits” - a much simpler concept that is relevant to business target audiences.
Tool, tools, tools
There is always pressure on researchers to use better “tools” – and get better insight, to understand, to identify, etc, etc. There is no doubt that B2B marketers should borrow more from the B2C world in this respect – but the emphasis is wrong. There needs to be more emphasis on the “what” than the “how” we evaluate – on organizational (versus individual) needs; on the strength of the corporate profile; on the needs and associated benefits of various target audiences; on business objectives and priorities.
Insight, insight and more insight
There is also a consistent demand for more "insight” into business thinking. It’s actually more about how to deal with the realities of business marketing: where one company dominates and everyone else is fighting for survival; where even the market leaders have poorly defined images and profiles; where marketers are more worried about the size of the sales force than the strength of the brand.
