Consumerization - The Changing Landscape of B2B Branding and the Hidden Challenges
B2B advertising sucks
A few years ago a pair of young advertising executives (Dave and Alex) conducted a review of 200 full-page B2B print ads most of which (79%) were rated as “poor”. Dave and Alex don’t work together anymore – Dave is now partnered with someone called Eddy. In the meantime things have changed. Business marketing (and advertising) has become more creative and interesting and has shamelessly borrowed from consumer marketing. But has it gone too far?? And have the underlying issues (that originally bothered Dave and Alex) still evident? Which leads to a discussion of consumerization.
What exactly is consumerization?
Consumerization basically involves applying consumer marketing approaches to business products and services. This can lead to: a lack of focus on the unique aspects of business products, services; and a poor understanding of the business marketing and branding processes.
The signs of consumerization
This is evidenced by: the misuse of mascots and similar advertising tactics; too much emphasis on establishing emotional connections with target audiences (to the detriment of responding to real needs); too much emphasis on entertaining business target audiences.
Consumer marketing is facing many challenges too – but consumer marketers have at least had many years to navel gaze and develop a good understanding of consumer marketing and advertising principles. Business marketing hasn’t even established a strong baseline in this respect.
The New Pig Corporation
In1985 New Pig invented a “sock” to clean up industrial and factory spills (the first prototype was made by stuffing corn cob bits into pantyhose). Over the next 20 years New Pig expanded the industrial sock to 4500 related products and, along the way, invented and dominated the "spill and leak containment" category. One day New Pig decided to add some sizzle to what they thought was a boring product line: the company introduced a mascot (Sparky the Pig) and a catalogue (called a PIGALOG) – and used these tools to successfully generate interaction with their customers.
HP and Mr. ‘Z’ the superhero
HP has released (recently) a series of Z-series workstations to challenge Apple and target the “digital creative market” comprised of graphic arts, broadcast and architecture professionals. The promotion will be built around a 3D cartoon character called Mr. ‘Z’ who will have his own website. The creative used to launch the product line resembles a series of movie trailers for blockbuster summer movies and Mr. ‘Z’ is supposed to represent the relevant product values of power, performance and reliability.
Both companies have clearly tried to spice up their creative but both are focused exclusively on business and industrial clients and are in a good position to control and monitor the message.
A red flag
I recently viewed a conference presentation focussing on creative approaches to profiling the personality of a mascot for a large Canadian institution. A major issue (for me) was to see business and consumer samples treated as one entity – leading to the assumption that both groups would respond similarly to the mascot; the business target audience wasn’t clearly defined; nor did there appear to be a separate creative strategy or separate objectives for the business sector.
The jury is still out
As business marketers try to maximize the appeal of their marketing programs it is tempting to glamourize the product or the marketing approach – but there are pitfalls:
• The emotional business buyer -- "Business buyers are people too – they have emotions" - this is one of the biggest myths of business marketing: the belief that a business manager uses similar parameters to buy breakfast cereal and make purchase decisions on behalf of his organization is not quite correct.
The role of emotions is, in fact, remarkably different in business marketing – business marketing emotions are 'outward' versus 'inner - directed and should be focused exclusively on feelings towards the brand or the company (versus how any brand makes you feel about yourself).
• Tactics vs. Strategy -- the temptation is to focus on the tactical versus the strategic side of business marketing – or the 'how' versus the 'what' of message communication. As the New Pig and HP case studies demonstrate, strategy should trump tactics.
• Hybridization -- one of the major factors impacting business marketing is the trend towards hybrid brands – mainly driven by business brands expanding to consumer markets (such as RIM). About one fifth (22%) of the Top 100 Interbrand brands are categorized as hybrids and outnumber the pure B2B brands (8%). Recognizing and sorting out business from consumer branding strategies is a challenge.
• The consumerization of business research -- business marketers can always learn from the consumer marketing world. But the case study described above demonstrates how tempting it is to throw consumer and business research into the same pile. It makes life so much easier but leads to false assumptions.
