Volume 96: A golden age…

1. A golden age of flippening. Huh?

tl;dr: Somebody isn’t very good at coining terms.

As part of a seemingly neverending analysis of B2B marketing, that happy band of Australian marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute is, once again, pointing out that the vast majority of B2B companies are doing marketing wrong. Specifically, focusing way too much on short-term lead generation and nowhere near enough on longer-term brand-building. The why of this is pretty straightforward since 95% of market participants simply aren’t in the market for a given product at a given moment. Meaning that your oh-so-carefully targeted account-based marketing is likely to be very wasteful while doing that seemingly inefficient top-of-the-funnel stuff would’ve done a better job at priming the sales pump.

But, what the article doesn’t mention is why this is happening in the first place. Here’s my take. In my experience, the vast majority of B2B corporations are driven by sales cultures. The sales team is usually the most important single group within the company. They’re lauded for their P&L contribution, have a strong leadership voice, and are heavily resourced. Marketing, by contrast, exists solely to service sales. They’re viewed as a cost, judged almost exclusively on leads generated, their primary focus (whether they realize it or not) is sales enablement and support, their resources are limited, and there simply isn’t the appetite for a whole lot of that “wishy-washy” brand-building stuff.

So what happens?

Well, a typical diagnosis goes something like this: The business has stalled, the sales team feels like they’re spending too much of their time explaining who they are rather than selling a product, they aren’t getting enough quality leads from marketing, and worst of all? There’s a competitor with an inferior product that’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room and outselling us. Sound familiar?

Then, the recriminations start flying. Sales are doing everything they can, but marketing isn’t doing its job. The brand isn’t cutting through (without acknowledging the lack of resources necessary to do so), we’re being left behind in the market, and we need to get back on our game. Luckily, we have a new product that’s about to launch, and if our heroic sales team can sell it to all of our existing customers, all of our growth requirements will be met.

But, it never works out that way. You don’t grow by selling to existing customers because they don’t all want your new product (95% not in the market, remember), and even if they did, you still need to compete for that business with those pesky oxygen suckers that are dead-nuts focused on growing their customer base at the expense of yours.

Look, I know it’s not all black and white here, but the dearth of brand-building in B2B is very, very real. And while the diagnosis I laid out above is also very real, the challenge, fundamentally, is that sales cultures find it exceptionally difficult to make investments that won’t pay off until after the current quarter ends. As a result, I’m pretty much convinced that the only way to make the so-called “flippening” happen is to disconnect marketing from sales in such a way that it isn’t beholden to sales, that it isn’t solely judged on its ability to serve up leads, that it is given authority over the marketing mix, and has the resources and skills necessary to build a brand as well as market to an account.

2. Voice builds message.

tl;dr: Voice matters way more than most think.

In the branding business, you hear over and over again the question “what’s the message?” And while having a clear, compelling, and cut-through message is important and good and great even, the message is nothing without the voice it’s communicated in.

When I say voice, what I’m talking about isn’t what you choose to say (that’s the message), it’s how you choose to say it.

A unique voice is what creates a situation where two brands can say essentially the same thing and yet appear oh so very different.

It’s also critical to success in our increasingly fragmented media landscape. In a world with hundreds of customer segments and lots of messages where we can appear in environments as disparate as a long-form whitepaper to a five-second interstitial, the voice becomes the vehicle for both consistency and distinctiveness.

And it isn’t solely about new or old brands or category-specificity. Just think Mailchimp and Nike. Both have a distinctive voice, yet each operates in a radically different category.

So, when you see how powerful a strong voice can be, it remains a mystery to me why it’s the ugly step-child of the branding world. We emphasize the strategy and the positioning, the message and the visual identity, the experience, and the advertising. Yet, voice (if included at all) is typically thrown in at the end. A throwaway deliverable you can charge a few extra dollars for that not a lot of thought has gone into. Now, I know some folks who work in advertising might see themselves as the guardians of a brand’s voice. And that’s all fine and all, but if this voice doesn’t extend an inch beyond the last campaign you ran, your guardianship isn’t really, well, guardianship.

We need to elevate voice and re-think it. Instead of a set of disconnected bullet-points, perhaps we could take inspiration from the world of screenwriting to build something richer and more enjoyable. If the brand is the protagonist within a story, what is its character? What’s the backstory? What drives them? What scares them? What motivates them? What emotions does this character elicit? How do they interact with others? What will their narrative arc be like? How will they respond to adversity, to opportunity, to moments of joy?

It’s not rocket science. We live in a golden age of storytelling and the tools are all around us to make a brand’s voice become so much more unique and interesting and attention-grabbing.

And, if you’ve made it this far, here’s a nice little deck on writing with emotion that I stumbled across that sparked this little diatribe.