Two-hour lecture to MSc in Marketing students in the Business to Business Marketing module at Lancaster University Management School on 13 March 2017.

1. Marketing communications &
brands in business markets
Lancaster University Management School
March 13, 2017
Duncan Chapple
Web business-school.ed.ac.uk
Web KeaCompany.com
Slides slideshare.net/dchapple
Blog InfluencerRelations.com
Twitter @DuncanChapple

2. Stepping stones
Professional
• Ovum: CRM industry analyst
• Omnicom: PR Business Group Director
• Deloitte: Senior comms manager
• Lighthouse: IR/PR board member
• Octopus Group: Associate Director, MR
• Kea Company: Managing Partner, AR
• University of Edinburgh Business
School: Faculty member
Educational
• Manchester: BA Humanities
• City: MSc Business Analysis
• Leipzig: Entrepreneurship
• UCLA/EDHEC: Exec program
• LBS/Dartmouth: MBA
• Edinburgh: PhD (ongoing)

3. 1.Start marketing directly to
account networks,
not to online personas.

4. Three in four of these sell mostly B2B

5. Neglecting the importance of
networks is an easy trap to fall into.
Influencer networks have changed, but
their role and significance in B2B
buyers' decision making hasn't. Why
would it? Product selection is only
marginally less risky for the buyer
— personally not necessarily
corporately — than it once was.
Ian
Hook
Warwick MBA
Chief
Operations
Officer
Cognia

6. Long sales cycles and big,
diverse buying teams
change the dynamics.
It's a long game.
Doug
Kessler
Cornell BA
Creative
Director
Velocity
Partners

7. Persona-based, content-driven online marketing
is easier to formulate (or in this case reduce to
contextual messages around appealing to
generalized personas) because B2B value
propositions are much more difficult to
communicate in real terms on the one hand and
on the other that depending on networks to drive
sales can cause fear of lack of market exposure
due to a “behind the scenes” approach
Joel
Terwilliger
University of
Technology
Sydney MSc
Fundraising and
stakeholder
relations
UTS, University
of Newcastle,
Washington
State

8. Easier to execute without value propositions
Show the feature. Where’s the value?
Booker: https://booker.wistia.com/medias/7r6acgd017

9. Must content-driven marketing attract
low value customers and turn
marketers’ focus from high value
networks?

10. Business marketing
differs from
consumer marketing
• More embedded role of networks
(of organisations and executives)
between the producer and the
consumer
• Ambiguity of the value of the
solution on offer.
Modern marketing has become laser
focussed onto content-driven online
marketing targetted to general models
of potential purchase influencer:
personas.
The reified over-reliance on persona-
based marketing means that
measurable clicks are displacing brand
equity approaches, based on
relationships that trust, emotion,
relevance and a resulting price
premium.

11. 2. Segment on material
and emotional benefits,
not just lead scores

12. There isn't just one B2B. The enterprise
sector, small and mid-sized business and
start-ups all differ. Many B2B marketing
plans are copies of approaches originally
tailored either big corporates or start-ups.
Speaking about B2B in general, without
designing for segments, is a mistake.
Often that generic approach leads to an
misunderstanding about where and how
choices are made. Some small businesses
work like consumers while larger
businesses have complex decision-making
processes.
Victoria
Rusnac
LBS MBA
Head of Marketing
Adzuna, Intuit, EE,
Orange, Nestlé

13. The largest problem I have seen in B2B
marketing is the tendency to focus on
your features and benefits rather
than your client’s business problem, its
cost and how your offer will solve it.
Robin
Stacpoole
LBS Sloan Fellow
Energy industry
business
development
Shell,
Weatherhead,
ComStrat

14. Rankings, click-throughs, online conversations,
are all measurable outcomes which — ultimately
for marketing it is where the rubber hits the road.
But like any statistics, they only tell part of the
story. A lot, of the problem here is the
management generation. Marketing has got more
complex, more opaque, and they are either still
trying to catch up or never got it the first time
round. Which drives them to drive marketing for
the here and now.
Ian
Hook
Warwick MBA
Chief
Operations
Officer
Cognia

15. B2B buying decisions are always based on a
Value for Money calculation and the associated
business case. Therefore you need to understand
the business case, and how the features and
benefits of your products and services apply to it.
Key in marketing is to engage and move their
business case to fit your commercial and technical
offering ahead of your competition's VfM
evaluation.
Nick
Richardson
Newcastle BSc
Business
development
consultant
The Logic Group,
Thales etc.

16. What interim solutions exist
between mass content marketing and
very tailored engagement strategies?

17. Undifferentiated
lead scoring is
displacing benefit-
based segmentation.
Marketers buy lists, and then
aim email and telephone campaigns
at those lists, successively narrowing
their focus on customers who keep
on responding.
The operational logic of that is clear:
you can’t call 5,000 executives, but you
can send one email a month and then
after half a year call the 100 who seem
to have opened most of them.
Instead of concentrated marketing
aimed at the most valuable segment,
or differentiated marketing based on
competitive positions, you have an
approach that focusses on the most
externally-informed, and time-rich,
buyers rather than those with the
highest benefit from your solution.

18. 3. Prioritise the emotional
promise, not clickbait

19. Case study:
Evian

20. #evianBabyBay
https://youtu.be/OWG3rtGoIlI

21. What product brand could not
use that creative approach?
Does that approach echo the Evian brand?
If you swap in another brand, does it still work?
Is this about the Evian brand if it could work just as well for Coke, Nike,
Gillette, or Samsung?

22. Evian once used babies in an on-brand way

23. The association between the message
and the brand’s value is slipping away.
Mostly shocking, awkward, or
somewhat entertaining adverts
are everywhere and the most you can
remember is the logo but how it will
help/why buy doesn’t linger – mostly
just remembering how annoying,
stupid, or simplistic (I already knew
that) it was
Joel
Terwilliger
University of
Technology
Sydney MSc
Fundraising and
stakeholder
relations
UTS, University
of Newcastle,
Washington
State

24. Sadly too often marketers get
distracted by the process of
marketing rather than focussing
on the purpose of marketing
Andrew
Yuille
MSc (Dist.)
Marketing &
Management
Head of Risk
Business
Solutions
Thomson
Reuters

25. Case study:
SaleCycle writes one
of 2016’s ten most-
shared B2B
marketing posts
180-strong online marketing
firm, headquarters hear
Durham
Marketing focusses on blog,
but 10 posts produce most
traffic
Conclusion: make less
content, focus on what gets
the most traffic (How to…
educational posts)
Widely shared and praised
viewpoint
http://bit.ly/lumsb2b

26. The tech that's driving new stuff
is going to drive your careers
more than you imagine.
The machine learning account
exec sounds like fiction but so did
driverless cars...
Sandy
Purewal
Chairman
Octopus
Group

27. Are there strengths to these
approaches that compensate for the
weaknesses? In some ways it's the old
problem of marketers confusing
tactics/execution with strategy.
Content marketing is critical.
But it is a process not a strategy.
Ian
Hook
Warwick MBA
Chief
Operations
Officer
Cognia

28. Should B2B brands focus on the content
that gets the most views?

29. Content marketing
often uses echoes,
not emotional
promises.
If you give people the content they
seem to want, then they will value
you as a content source and consume
more of your content.
But should you focus on the content
people want to read?
The biggest problem with that is clear
from a glance at the SuperBowl adverts
or the advertising firms that win the
Lions at Cannes: you end up
entertaining people rather than
reasserting the value of what you have
to sell. Of course, the best brands can
produce engaging advertising that is
on-brand, but many are on the road to
cute puppies, monkeys and babies but
no emotional promise of the benefits
they provide.

30. 4. Focus on relationships,
not easy campaigns.

31. It's not about hanging
with the ad agency,
but working with the
sales force.
Mark
Ritson
Lancaster BSc
& PhD
Marketing
professor
Melbourne
Business School

32. Graduate marketeers are preoccupied with
learning about digital marketing. Rightly so: many
organisations are still learning. But this is no
substitute for understanding the buyer,
understanding their buying process, their
influences, and ensuring their marketing
programme is founded on a rock solid strategy,
the tenets of which haven't changed since the
days of Kotler.
Ian
Hook
Warwick MBA
Chief
Operations
Officer
Cognia

33. Do marketing metrics develop short
termism rather than customer- or
relationship- orientation?

34. Marketing is
focussed on
webalytics, not
satisfaction or
repurchase.
Because business marketing
sells to networks of influencers, and
because the initial purchases are
often unprofitable, the management
of client accounts should be more
important to marketers than new
business development.
Because our value proposition evolves
over time, we to need to use the
decision to buy from us as an
opportunity to increase our
understanding of each client's
developing problems and
opportunities. But marketing also
needs to understand how far we are
meeting our promises, and which new
benefits are being realised, so that our
marketing is in line with the value we
really produce. Technology-driven
marketing points marketing and sales
people away from that, and towards a
conveyor belt of content marketing
campaigns focussed on up-sell and
cross-sell opportunities.

35. Summary
Start with networks, not personas
Lead scoring is displacing benefit-based
segmentation
Content marketing is turning marketing
from an emotional promise into an echo
chamber
Up-sell and cross-sell replaces
relationship-based fulfillment

36. Recent, valuable opinion
• How B2B Sales Can Benefit from Social Selling - HBR
http://bit.ly/2mlQXfe
• How B2B digital leaders drive five times more revenue
growth than their peers - McKinsey
http://bit.ly/2n6pFI9
• 10 Fearless Predictions for B2B Sales and Marketing -
Gartner
http://gtnr.it/2lDUUgy
• How b2b CMOs can align sales & marketing - Branding
Magazine
http://bit.ly/2n6dtHh

37. Questions? Comments?

38. Marketing communications &
brands in business markets
Lancaster University Management School
March 13, 2017
Duncan Chapple
Managing Partner, Kea Company
Work KeaCompany.com
Slides slideshare.net/dchapple
Blog InfluencerRelations.com
Twitter @DuncanChapple