It’s long been accepted wisdom that marketing to business people, especially in the world of technology, is fundamentally different from consumer marketing. It’s complex and rational with more people involved along the decision-making process. There is the input from specifiers and influencers, as well as the finance department and the ultimate decision-maker. However, a number of trends are having a significant impact on how people make decisions in business.
More IT decisions are being made outside of the IT department. Gartner have predicted that chief marketing officers will be spending more on IT than chief technology officers by 2017. These senior decision-makers are educating themselves and can move a long way down the decision-making process before engaging a supplier and their sales team. Search, social media, peer-to-peer networking along with events and content play an important part in this, and while there are more companies competing for attention, fewer brands are being considered.
Crucially for marketing communications, business decisions are high risk and reflect on the decision maker. So they are actually more emotionally involved in the decision than consumers are in most purchases, with their professional reputation potentially at stake. This means that customers are more likely to buy from brands that are popular, develop an emotional attachment with their audience and are seen to provide value on a personal as well as a professional level.
So you would think that business to business (B2B) marketing would now be as emotionally engaging and accessible as consumer marketing. You’d be wrong, because B2B marketing communication, with a few notable exceptions, still often lacks empathy and insight. It’s caught up in features and specifications in the mistaken belief that buyers are solely driven by the rational.
At Arc, we’re delivering powerful results for world-class B2B companies by looking at their customers as people first, mining insights from individual attitudes and motivations, and then producing consumer-grade creativity that breeds emotional connection. We have found that skills and tools originally developed for B2C tasks are increasingly transferable; indeed, the evidence is that they can be a real source of competitive advantage to our B2B clients.
Ian Thomas is managing partner at Arc London
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