More on What's Right (and wrong ) with B2B Advertising
“We find it truly surprising that businesses full of smart people produce so much advertising that isn’t...Why then is good business-to-business advertising so hard to come by?” DAVE AND ALEX.
Dave and Alex are a pair of advertising executives who evaluated 79% of a set of 200 B2B print ads as “poor”. They followed up this assessment with a 12-page (highly entertaining) supplement called: “Why do so many business-to-business ads suck?"
1.The misunderstood business customer: some ads would have you believing that business buyers are “soulless automatons with parallel processors for brains”.
MY OPINION: the individual making an organizational purchase is weighing unique parameters – the B2B and B2C purchase processes are not equivalent. Emotions do play a part in B2B decision-making but it is qualitatively different from consumer decisions. The B2B campaign should focus on the feelings generated about the product or the company – the B2C campaign focuses on how the customer feels about himself.
2. The sales guy culture: B2B marketers are more likely to be drawn from sales and engineering backgrounds, and sales guy advertising tends to resemble product brochures.
MY OPINION: somewhat true. B2B marketing efforts are often reactive rather than proactive (i.e. prompted by a specific turn of events). There is a lack of strong training programs focusing on the business marketing, branding and advertising processes.
3.Lazy agency syndromes. According to Dave and Alex, agencies creating B2B ads tend to resort too easily to business terms and clichés such as handshakes and globes and mountain climbers. An internet search (by Dave and Alex) turned up thousands of clichés: “Why we mean business...When we say internet we mean business...We mean business in space”.
MY OPINION: again, a lot of this reflects a lack of understanding of the business marketing and advertising processes including: the role of emotion in business marketing and advertising; the uniqueness of business products and services.
4.Corpo-babble: the inability to speak clearly and directly to the target audience such as the following example: “Anticipating millions of connections your network will support, we deliver a business optimized infrastructure that provides scalability”.
MY OPINION: business marketing has become better than ever at communicating a single meaningful message and utilizing effective creative. Note the following headline for an IBM ad: “Stop thinking like a bank. Start thinking like a customer”. This is an ad informing bankers how IBM can ensure that their customers can open a new account in minutes rather than hours! It effectively uses copy and visuals to back up benefits suggested in the headline.
5. Marketing schizophrenia: Dave and Alex say the typical B2B marketer knows how he has to “differentiate” his product but when push comes to shove tends to back away from creative opportunities and seeks “credibility” and “security”.
MY OPINION: a fading problem – as evidenced by the many good examples of focused B2B marketing and advertising out there but some may be going too far (but that happens in the B2C world).
6.Trying to hard: when they do go out on a limb, B2B marketers will try to be unique and draw attention to themselves in almost a “frantic and hyperactive” fashion”.
MY OPINION: this is still very true – sometimes it is very hard to tell who some business ads are targeting. Fortunately it’s not all bad news. Many more B2B companies are investing in business marketing and there is a noticeable increase in the variety and number of business advertising campaigns. BtoB Magazine, for example, in its monthly evaluation of business advertising campaigns (Chasers) has no trouble digging up examples of both well and poorly executed B2B campaigns. This suggests we’ve come a long way as an industry but there remains lots of opportunity for improvements.
