I'm Bene, MD and Chief Strategy Officer at a B2B brand building agency, alan. Since taking over in 2023, I've looked to give the agency a real focus with brand building in B2B and create a discipline around brand.
And what that looks like in practice is helping brands with brand strategy and brand campaigns. On the strategy side of things, that's everything from big-ticket, upstream strategy like rebrands, positioning all the way down to more applied strategic activities such as messaging. And if we think about that as helping brands find their stories, on the other side, it’s all about helping brands tell their story through brand campaigns.
And this is where it gets interesting as we operate at the intersection of advertising and thought leadership. So it draws on all of our journalistic heritage, but infuses that with the big conceptual thinking of advertising.
At alan, we’re on a mission to ‘make B2B brands household names’ in their sectors. This is a big shift. It also sounds a bit bonkers when the received wisdom is that B2B marketing is all about being targeted and, ultimately, generating leads for sales.
Clearly there is truth in that wisdom but our view is that it's too narrow and shuts down the opportunity for marketing to make an impact at a business level. From a marketing perspective, the only way to make that sort of mark and genuinely change the fortunes of the business is through brand.
As has been shown by people like Binet & Field, if you invest in building a brand that audiences collectively understand and buy into, the business effects are manifold. And i’m not just talking price premium and market share, at-scale brand storytelling has the potential to redefine markets and create category leadership.
If you invest in building a brand that audiences collectively understand and buy into, the business effects are manifold.
In terms of how we’re actually driving this change, it’s all about being really clear on the ultimate business outcomes, not the marketing objectives. We challenge marketers to first put marketing objectives to one side, however well defined they are, and think about what needs to be achieved at a business level. What does the business need to look like? How does it need to be positioned in the marketplace? Looking at things from this macro business level enables you to open your mind beyond simply activation or generating leads, to something with longer-term strategic value that actually makes a meaningful difference to the business.
A campaign that really stood out to me is one that won the Eurobest Creative B2B campaign of the year. I was fortunate enough to be on the judging panel for that. It was a campaign done by a shipping and logistics brand called DP World, called 'The Move to -15.'
This was based around research they'd done which challenged the conventional wisdom within their industry, conventional wisdom being that all cold storage of foods needs to be at minus 18 degrees centigrade. This is something which has been in existence for probably around 100 years and has always just been accepted as fact. It's never been challenged.
But within the context of sustainability commitments and the positive agenda for change that DP World have, they wanted to understand what tolerance exists when it comes to cold storage. Because if you can bring that temperature up a little bit, the savings that can be made from a carbon perspective are enormous.
So they conducted this research and discovered that it was actually safe to do at minus 15, and that minus 18 was a legacy from how absolute zero was measured in Fahrenheit, but didn't actually have any grounding in modern day science.
They used this insight to tell a story of change to the industry, to confront the way that people have traditionally been doing things and almost embarrass the industry into feeling a collective sense of responsibility for making that change happen. Now that's not provocative in the generic sense of the word - there's no harsh language or shocking imagery. But that insight is so provocative, one, because it is confronting, and two, it's provocative because it’s a genuine catalyst of industry change.
And I think that's what really good B2B marketing is about. It's when you have a really strong, intellectually sound insight that you can deliver in a way which is so emotionally compelling it creates change.
I think firstly, it's about the definition of storytelling and certainly the way that we look at it here at alan. is that a good story needs to be intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling.
I think traditionally marketing is quite good at the first part. There is that intellectual, rational coherence to what's being said: 'This is costing you X amount of money. Therefore, if you invest in Y, you will receive Z savings,' and so forth. There's nothing wrong with the intellectual coherence of that, but ultimately that isn't persuasive and it doesn't bring people into the story that you're trying to tell. And that's where this emotional connection comes in.
A good example of that is in some recent work we did for Elsevier. They are a legacy publisher, but are now also a data and intelligence company specialising in academia. They had launched, but wanted to grow market share for, a technology which helps assess the real-world impact of research.
To tell this story, what we discovered, having done some investigation, is that there was a disconnect between the research done and the real-world impact, and the perception of the public was that academia wasn't contributing in the way that it actually was.
On a rational, practical level, it's easy to build that argument for why academia needs to invest more in being able to demonstrate its impact. You demonstrate that impact, then you get more public support. You get more public support, then you get more political support for academia, you get more grants, more funding.
That's the intellectual argument and that is persuasive. But ultimately a lot of academics would already understand this and there was nothing really which caused them to think about things differently, to actually compel and motivate them to understand why they needed to do it. So what we looked to do, in addition to that really strong intellectual argument, was to tell a story, to use analogy for why academics should feel duty bound to act and invest in real-world impact.
The way that we did that was to reimagine academics as astronauts disappearing into far-flung reaches of space, inaccessible from the real world and therefore not grounded in the realities that were faced. And our story was about these astronauts returning to Earth, returning to a hero's welcome. And by doing that, demonstrating the importance of academics being able to communicate their impact on the real world and to receive the level of recognition and celebration that they deserve.
The obvious answer is a move away from short-term activation and the incremental gains that gives to more of an investment in longer-term brand building, which can actually drive the sort of seismic shifts that businesses need if they want to move forward. So I think investment in brand is one thing.
Secondly, something that I think we need to break out of in B2B marketing is recycling the same old thoughts, ideas and opinions. Everyone is basically saying the same thing, whether that’s in their value propositions or their thought leadership. And, ironically, this is only going to get worse with GenAI. People are piling in to the same tools, with the same prompts, referencing the same information, which means messaging and content is going to get more and more homogenous.
Something that I think we need to break out of in B2B marketing is recycling the same old thoughts, ideas and opinions.
Now you can get novel outputs from things like ChatGPT with a bit of imagination and artistry to your prompts but on a more practical level, the gamechanger is original input. Feed your own research data, a transcript from an interview with an SME in and you can start to get something differentiated, something proprietary.
Change is difficult. It's much easier just to embrace the status quo as much as anything else. So I think the one challenge that I will put down to the team when it comes to pushing for change is rather than for them to make the argument for why we shouldn't change things, is to make the positive argument for maintaining the status quo.
I think what this unveils is that actually the status quo is not going to deliver the impact that you want. It's not going to have that effect which you really need to drive things forward. So by flipping that around and asking them to make the positive case for the status quo, it actually opens their eyes inadvertently to the positive case for change.
Intelligence.
It comes down to the need to make the intellectual and the emotional argument in a piece of communication to actually compel someone into taking an action -which is what marketing is all about. And I think that the mistake that I see time and time again in B2B marketing, it ends up being binary. You either have something which is intellectually deep, it's really got that sort of coherence, but it lacks any emotion. Or on the other side, because there is such a push for B2B marketing to be more emotional, the brands do things which are frivolous and don't have that sort of depth and substance that's required.
So for me, the one piece of advice is to make sure that you're always getting that balance between the emotional and the intellectual - the love and the logic. If you don’t win both arguments, you won’t change minds.
To re-form your industry, we must re-form ours first. From our visceral point of view on creativity to our incisive approach to strategy, delve into our provocative thought-leadership on how we’re aiming to subvert B2B’s status quo.
