A few thoughts on B2B marketing – Page 3

Who does the boss turn to for advice when they run out of bosses?

Most of us, at most points in our careers, have a boss to turn to for advice.

Whether we’re faced with a tricky client, or a challenging colleague, or a seemingly unsurmountable task, we can generally ask the boss for help.

And whilst they might not necessarily take all our troubles away, a boss will often have seen a similar situation and have some ideas for you as to how you might tackle the situation at hand.

But who do senior execs turn to for advice when they finally attain the pinnacle of their professional ambition and reach the plushly-carpeted corridors of the fabled C Suite?

Pause for a moment to imagine the CTO musing on whether to take their company’s data off premise and into the cloud.

Or the CFO pondering taxation mitigation strategy for the coming financial year.

Or the CHRO having to anticipate the impact of hybrid working on employee contracts.

It’s hard to imagine any of them going to their CEO and saying: “Not sure what to do here, boss – what do you reckon?”

Because the CEO’s likely response is going to be: “That’s what I’m paying YOU to tell ME”.

So who do the C Suite turn to for advice?

They can’t really ask their own direct reports (“Hang on, boss, aren’t you supposed to be the expert here?”)

And even if they’ve got a mass of professional qualifications under their belt, not every MBA case study would have helped them plan for the impact of a global pandemic, for example.

So – possibly for the first time in their career – they will have to look outside their own business for business advice.

It’s at this point that a whole host of consultancies try and push their way into view. Management consultancies, strategic advisories and the like – all promising access to teams with unrivalled expertise, insight, experience.

But how does a potential client choose between them when so many have such similar propositions?

According to recent research by LinkedIn and Edelman (Thought Leadership Impact Study | LinkedIn & Edelman) the answer is thought leadership. Apparently 69% of decision makers agree that thought leadership “is one of the best ways to gauge a sense of the type and caliber of an organization’s thinking”.

A key insight is that it’s not so much the company, but the individual consultant that the potential client wants to assess.

BigCo Consulting may well have 1,000 partners in every continent, but what the C Suite really want to know about is who will be advising me?

What do they know about my challenge? What expertise can they bring to bear?

I’ve heard a senior partner at a major consulting house dismiss thought leadership content as “mere vanity publishing”. Something the marcomms team keep pestering them for. “Window dressing for the website”.

But for the savvy advisor, it’s actually the first step in establishing a personal client relationship that is based on provenance of individual expertise.

Surely if you’re a partner in an advisory firm and you’re working on a billable-hours basis, it’s you that you want prospective clients to ask to hire: not just one of your colleagues?

And how do you make sure those prospective clients know to ask for you by name?

Maybe writing thought leadership posts for your company website isn’t window-dressing after all…

If you want help conducting a business survey as source material for your thought leadership, please get in touch.

Simon Hayhurst

www.hayhurstcounsultancy.co.uk

June 2021

Picture credit: Shutterstock

Why gated B2B white papers can lead to fewer sales, not more

Imagine you need to buy some double glazing.

Apologies if the thought brings you out in hives, but I’m guessing that the anxiety you’re feeling right now has far less to do with cost, and far more to do with fending off endless calls from pushy reps keen to sell to you their wares in the comfort of your own front room.

Double glazing isn’t cheap, and the salespeople are a hassle. So before letting any sales bod anywhere near your parlour I don’t doubt you’d do quite a bit of background research. Talk to the neighbours. Look on Trustpilot. Ask your Facebook friends. Look at a few websites.

You’d draw up a long list of potential providers, and I’m guessing that only when you’re fairly certain who you’d like to use do you actually let any of them know that you’d actually be interested in a quote.

Your logic is simple: it’s a significant purchase and you want to make the right decision – which for you means that you don’t want to be blindsided by a salesman’s fancy spiel until you’ve fully researched the market.

I was reminded of this scenario when I recently read research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute with regards to how B2B marketers often use “gated” reports. ⁽¹⁾

A gated report is one whether the potential reader can’t access it without first giving up their contact details to the company that’s published it.

This seems a fair exchange at first glance: the sponsoring company has developed the content because they want to generate sales leads from interested prospects. Capturing contact details from prospects makes enormous sense in that regard.

If someone is interested in your product, then offering a gated report is a great way to get them to identify themselves, yes?

However, the B2B Institute’s paper suggests that something different may be happening – and that by gating reports, businesses are LESS likely to make sales.

In LinkedIn’s research, only 25% of B2B buyers say that they’re willing to share contact details to access interesting content.

Potential buyers are all too aware that the moment they identify themselves as having an interest in a solution, they go onto the CRM prospect list, and – like many a double-glazing salesman’s prospect – can never get themselves off it.

So rather than be forced to raise their hand before they’re ready to engage, a significant number of B2B enquirers would rather not raise their hand at all.

And if that means they pass on the opportunity to read your paper, so be it. Other papers are available.

B2B marketers that make their white papers freely available are therefore far more likely to achieve broad market reach with their comms than those that limit who can see their thinking.

This ties in with some of the theory in Les Binet & Peter Field’s “The B2B Marketing Growth Formula” ⁽²⁾ – because gating white papers actually puts a major constraint on reach.

And in B2B marketing, reach is important – as Ngaire Moyes, Senior Director, Brand Marketing and Corporate Communications, at LinkedIn, explains:

“As a marketer, you…need the ability to reach all of the people who could be involved in buying decisions over the longer term. Because branding is a long game, it can’t be hyper targeted. It has to take the most inclusive possible view of your relevant audience. It may be years before they are considering your business for a purchase – but that’s how long it takes to build a compelling brand to influence that decision. Waiting until they are ready to be tightly targeted at the bottom of the funnel is waiting too long.” ⁽²⁾

David van Schaick of The Marketing Practice has a further perspective:

“The longer sales cycles in B2B mean that long-term thinking isn’t just brand building – sales and demand generation also require long-term mindsets.” ⁽³⁾

In other words, the greater the reach of your B2B marcoms, the more likely it is that you’ll attract potential buyers to the top of your funnel.

By limiting access to your sales messages to those who are closest to a buying decision, you’re going to miss out on a large proportion of genuine prospects – LinkedIn’s research suggests 75% of potential prospects – who never entered your funnel in the first place.

Simon Hayhurst

June 2021

When the secret of successful brand research really is simplicity

There’s an awful lot of brand BS spoken by “practitioners” who deliberately muddy the waters with endless funnels, spidergrams, flowcharts and the like.

It’s almost as if they thrive on confusion rather than clarity.

Those “practitioners” (I use the word advisedly) would be dismayed to learn that perhaps the most powerful piece of B2B brand research I’ve been involved with asked just a single core question.

It simply asked respondents: “To what extent do you associate – or dissociate – our brand with each of the five following attributes?”

The questionnaire then listed each of the brand’s claimed “values” in turn, and respondents clicked on a five-point scale with regards to the extent to which…well, you get the rest.

That was it. That was the questionnaire.

It’s taken you longer to read this far than it took respondents to complete it.

To his credit, it was the Marketing Director who insisted the questionnaire was deliberately simple – which meant research participation was high, and there was no chance of respondent wear-out. It’s probably the shortest commercial questionnaire I’ve worked on.

But its real power and value crystallised when the data came in, because it was conducted amongst three distinct populations:

(a) existing customers

(b) current prospects and

Lo and behold whilst there were some positive alignments between what staff, customers and prospects thought about the brand, there were some important differences.

On one measure, staff (senior staff, in particular) thought much more positively about the brand than customers did.

On another measure, customer-facing staff thought much more negatively about the brand than their own customers did. (Which made sense in a way – it turned out that customer-facing staff are constantly having to deal with dissatisfied customers, and so believe the world thinks their service is flawed. Whereas the vast majority of customers were happy, and so never had cause to speak to the call centre staff in the first place).

On two other values, it quickly became clear that prospects had no clear view on what the company stood for.

And so…

Resolvable brand perception gaps across territories became apparent.

Resolvable brand perception gaps between Enterprise customers and SMEs became apparent, too.

As did resolvable brand perception gaps between Senior Management and coalface staff.

Just one simple question enabled management to pinpoint a whole range of issues:

Product design needed to be re-examined to align with the brand promise
Promotional strategies needed to be tweaked to account for territorial brand nuances
Senior management needed to focus effort on driving customer-driven change rather than resting on their brand-comms laurels
Broad brand messaging could be supported with genuine evidence of existing customer satisfaction
ABM tactics could be adjusted to reflect differences between SME and Enterprise clients
Staff morale could be lifted by promoting how much better customers thought they were doing their jobs than the staff themselves did

And a dozen more things besides.

I think it was Maurice Saatchi that said his agency “prided themselves on ruthless clarity of thought”.

To my mind “ruthless clarity of thought” can be enormously beneficial in brand questionnaire design.

(The more nefarious brand “practitioners” might want to take note.)

If you’re a B2B brand manager who’d welcome some help simplifying your brand research, please get in touch.

Simon Hayhurst

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

June 2021

Why most brand promises are purest waffle

Our car insurance renewal arrived last week from Aviva. Like many people’s, it was slightly higher than last year’s quote – despite the fact that we’d made no changes to the cover required, nor made a claim in the last year.

Indeed, as my wife and I both work from home – and given the lockdown that everyone has been suffering – we’ve hardly driven the car at all since March 2020.

So in frustration, my wife took it on herself to shop around for a better quote, and immediately found one – a good £200 cheaper – from a brand called General Accident.

Now I have worked in financial services since what feels like the dawn of time (well, 1986 to be exact) and have some distant dusty memory from those days of General Accident as an independent insurance brand, that was subsequently merged with Commercial Union, who were eventually bought by Norwich Union, who eventually rebranded as…Aviva.

So I find all this a little impecunious. It would seem that Aviva’s underwriters consider my wife and I an increasingly risky bet despite our parsimonious driving – yet their departmental cousins across the corridor at General Accident think we are definitely worth taking a punt on, and are happy to charge us £200 less for taking on the risk.

So what does this have to do with brand promises?

Well…I thought it would be interesting to mosey over to the Aviva website and have a peek at what they claim their brand values are.

You can find them here: It takes Aviva – Aviva plc

Surprise, surprise, they don’t include “Opportunistic” or “Disingenuous”.

Instead – far less surprisingly – they include such blandishments as “Care, commitment, community and confidence”.

If you click the Aviva link, you’ll see that old financial services cliché “trust” isn’t far behind.

Which brings me to why most brand promises are pretty worthless.

Many years ago, a wiser marketer than me stated that a brand has three pillars:

How you act
How you say you act, and
How people think you act

If the above three are positive and all align, then potentially you have a strong brand.

So why are most brand promises purest waffle?

Most Brand Managers I have worked with will use (2) to try to influence (3), but crucially most brand managers have absolutely no actual say in what (1) is.

That’s because defining how a company actually behaves in practice is the role of the Board, and in particular the Chief Exec.

And that’s the real reason why I’m having a little rant at Aviva.

Because what makes Aviva worse than most in the brand promise stakes is that their brand statement is publicly endorsed by their Chief Exec – who presumably has some pretty significant influence on pricing policy.

It’s really no good claiming, as Group CEO Amanda Blanc does on the website:

“Aviva is the only insurer in the UK that can serve all customers’ needs, at every stage of their lives. I want out brand to reflect this, building trust and confidence with our customers” (my italics)

when on Amanda’s watch she promises one thing of how her brand will behave, and then watches whilst it does the opposite.

Of course, Amanda isn’t the only Chief Exec in the insurance world making brand promises that are little more than platitudinous waffle. There are plenty more in the wider world similarly trying to convince their customers that they are “Leading the world in environmental responsibility”; “Putting the customer at the heart of all that we do” or <add your own company’s Brand Purpose statement here>.

I’m pretty sure Aviva’s Head of Brand isn’t the only one bashing their head against a wall in frustration whilst clutching a sheaf of research telling them that “trust” is the one key value to which insurance customers would like to be able to hold their insurer.

So please big companies: either live up to your brand promises, or have a really good think about what your brand values actually are.

It’s no good making grand brand promises about being one thing, then doing the opposite.

Anything else is as convincing as putting lipstick on a gorilla.

Simon Hayhurst

Hayhurst Consultancy

May 2021

Picture credit: Red Apple Lipstick Review: Does Red Apple Live Up To The Hype? (mapleholistics.com)

Sometimes less is more

I missed a message from a client a few days back.

Thankfully it wasn’t urgent, but it led me to question whether we are benefiting or being besieged by the multiplicity of ways we can be reached nowadays.

The client had sent me a note via WhatsApp, but the fact that I hadn’t seen it set me thinking.

I can be contacted – as can you, I’m guessing – via phone (home and mobile), work email, personal email, text, LinkedIn messages, Twitter DMs, Teams messaging, Facebook Messenger and (when I actually check my phone) Whatsapp.

Then there’s Zoom Chat, Slack Messenger, YouTube messenger, Instagram messenger, Blink and a whole host of others.

And now there’s a new way of staying in touch: Clubhouse.

I have to say I’m late to the Clubhouse party (maybe it’s just that no-one’s invited me) but the last thing I feel I need right now is yet another communications channel that actually presents an opportunity to *miss* a communication – because I’m so busy checking all my other channels to see if anyone’s tried to get in touch.

I asked my friend’s daughter, who’s an IT whizz, whether it would be possible for someone (preferably her – she’d be an overnight millionaire) to aggregate all these comms channels into a single app that lets you know with a single beep if anyone has tried to reach you by any of the above means.

Voila – no more missed messages.

Apparently as most of them use e2e encryption it’s not feasible. Pity – I think my friend was hoping to retire early on the (her) proceeds.

But it does remind me of the time not so long back where each mobile phone manufacturer decided to have their own unique charging port – which just created a tangle of wires and frustration. What we’ve got here seems to be something similar. Every app and device manufacturer wants to try and enclose you in their own ecosystem, for their benefit, not yours.

What we actually need right now are fewer channels of communication, not more.

So my plea to all those developers and venture capitalists rushing to launch even more ways to stay in touch: “Don’t bother”.

If you agree (or disagree) with the sentiment in the blog, please feel free to leave a message. Just don’t expect me to see it right away.

Pfft.

Simon Hayhurst

B2B marketing is a fiendishly complex puzzle: here’s how to solve it

It’s been said that if consumer marketing is a game of draughts, then by comparison B2B marketing is 3D chess.

That’s because B2B marketers have to overcome a myriad of complex challenges that consumer marketers rarely face:

The decision-making process is infinitely more complex for a business compared to a consumer
B2B marketers have a number of buyer personas to satisfy to make a single sale
A B2B purchase is rarely impulsive: a client’s procurement process can go through several rounds, over several months
The client’s buying cycle can last years, not days
What you’re selling could cost £millions, not pennies
The total buyer audience can number just dozens, not millions

And yet B2B marketers are often tasked with meeting all the above challenges with a fraction of the budgets that FMCG marketers enjoy.

How best to take on that challenge?

There are two key frameworks the B2B marketer can utilise to help win this particular game.

Framework 1: The Extended Model of Business Decision Making

The B2B marketer needs to understand the following of their prospective target audience:

What event or situation is / are the typical triggers for a prospect business looking for a solution which the seller can provide?

Competitor advantage? Operational inefficiency? New technologies making existing solutions redundant? Commencement of a buying cycle? Contractual breach by an existing supplier?

What sources of information does the purchasing company typically use when researching the solution?

Do they talk to a professional adviser or broker? Visit a trade exhibition? Ask their peers? Read the trade press? Ask their direct reports? Undertake an RFI?

What alternative solutions – competitive to the seller – might a purchasing company consider?

What are the attractive elements of the competition’s propositions? On what basis does the buyer draw up a shortlist of potential suppliers?

When deciding between vendors, what are the decision criteria that are taken into account, and what importance is attached to each?

Price is rarely the sole determinant: other factors may include supplier credibility in delivery; ease of solution integration with existing systems or processes; compliance considerations (e.g. re data security in the context of GDPR); and increasingly a company’s commitment to environmental & social governance.

Having appointed a vendor, did the supplier actually deliver on their promises?

Are the end users happy? Would that company appoint that supplier again?

Once the B2B marketer can map out these stages, they will have a framework they can use to develop a proposition (or more often, a series of propositions) that can take a prospect through each of the above stages, helping ensure that they win the ongoing business.

At each stage, they also need to understand how their competitors’ approaches / propositions are more relevant than their own.

Thus hopefully avoiding the situation where having done all the top-of-funnel work, a competitor inveigles their way onto a shortlist, and steals the business at the final turn.

The key question to ask therefore is: “What do we have to do / be / say / offer to come first at each of those stages?”

So far so good. But to be fair the above buyer decision making framework is equally applicable to a high involvement consumer purchase (such as a car, or a mortgage).

So why the 3D chess analogy for B2B?

What makes B2B marketing so much harder than consumer marketing is that even for a car or a mortgage, the “buyer persona” going through all the above stages is usually just one individual.

B2B sellers have to contend with the fact that there are often many different people involved in the ultimate decision-making process. (Indeed our recent research for Momentum ABM discovered that the average buying team for a $3m+ technology investment is 15 people*).

Hence Framework 2 – Buyer Personas:

All the above personas will have varying levels of input to the purchase decision, at different stages of that purchase. Some input will be formal, some informal.

And they will often have conflicting requirements.

Specifiers may demand a solution beyond the budget holder’s means.

Users needs may not be fully taken into account at the purchase stage, resulting in dissonance once the solution is implemented.

Buyers – frequently Procurement – may counsel against an otherwise-suitable supplier because the supplier isn’t on the existing supplier roster.

And so on.

The B2B marketing strategy therefore needs to take into account the needs of each of the typical Buyer Personas in order to adequately mitigate their conflicting demands. And do it better than the competition.

Winning the game

So in order to win this game of 3D chess, the B2B marketer has to map out BOTH the client decision making process AND overlay that with an understanding of the roles and needs of the various buyer personas in order to develop a watertight proposition strategy.

If the marketer does it well, they should end up with a winning proposition strategy that is:

Relevant to each of the buyer personas, at each stage of the buyer process
Distinctive from what the competition are promising
Demonstrably deliverable

No one said 3D chess was easy, but there’s no doubt of the scale of the intellectual challenge compared to a game of draughts. And the consequent satisfaction when the game is won.

Of course, market research can help B2B marketers put insight flesh on the bones of the above frameworks.

If you ever need help with B2B marketing strategy and want to pick my brains, please do get in touch via the contact details below.

Simon Hayhurst

February 2021

*source: https://wearemomentum.com/customer-buying-index/

How creating an emotional reason to purchase can trump a rational one

Insurance is dull, no matter how marketers try to dress it up.

Renewing your annual insurance policy is a grind akin to queuing at the bank, or filling the car up with fuel. The less time you spend doing it the better. Indeed any time you spend doing it is resented.

Yet once a year we are all forced to schlep through a tedious process in order to convince ourselves we’ve saved a few quid on something we resent spending money on in the first place.

The insurers themselves have always known that pretty much all their competitors’ household and motor policies are essentially the same.

And so the obvious way for them to build market share where all product features are identical has always been to compete on price.

Historically, consumers would ask their local insurance broker to sort this for them. More recently they’ve gone to an insurance comparison website (which essentially does the same thing, just online).

And so the battle of the insurance brands has shifted away from insurance companies towards insurance aggregators (to use the industry term).

But as all aggregators’ central propositions revolve around the rational proposition of “saving you time and money”, we’re back to the age-old problem: how do you sell insurance successfully on anything other than price?

Step forward the ad agency VCCP and their client Compare the Market.

What I think VCCP and Compare The Market (CTM) understood from the outset was that if they could turn the insurance policy buying decision from a relatively high-involvement rational one to a much lower-involvement emotional one they could capture market share without needlessly giving away margin.

But how to do this? CTM knew their price comparison site couldn’t reasonably claim to save more time or money than other price comparison sites. Ultimately they’re all brokering policies from the same panels of underwriters.

VCCP’s solution for CTM was to create “cuddly” brand characters with the scantest connection to the product (“Compare the Meerkat”? Really?) and in so doing they deliberately shifted the essence of the campaign from ‘rational reason-to-believe’ to ‘emotional reason-to-purchase’.

They did this in the knowledge that once you get a consumer emotionally involved with your brand it can give you a distinctive market position that is difficult for the competition to counter. Which is why so much of CTMs marketing communications has very little to do with insurance – the Coronation Street idents being a case in point – and far more to do with driving emotional engagement with the CTM brand.

However I suspect the true genius of the campaign was actually the decision to give away free CompareTheMarket-branded cuddly meerkats to customers who bought policies.

Because the other aggregators in the market had a generic proposition, the branded meercat giveaway gave CTM the fractional advantage it needed to take market share without conceding margin.

Indeed I suspect a fair proportion of CTM’s policy purchases are actually down to kids’ pester power. If a parent is forced to renew their insurance annually, for relatively undiscerning customers the comparison site that gives your kids a free toy on top of the insurance wins the business.

Sure, other comparison sites can give away freebies too – Confused.com are currently giving away £20 petrol / shopping vouchers with every policy purchased. But I’m guessing that those £20 vouchers probably cost at least twice to source what CTM pays to source the Sleepy Oleg toy they’re currently giving away in the run up to Xmas.

And because the CTM giveaway is directly connected to the brand itself, it isn’t something the competition can easily copy.

Economists will tell you that in a perfectly competitive market, fractional advantage can result in massively disproportionate market share due to the elasticity of demand.

So hats off to VCCP and CompareTheMarket for realising this. They’ve created a market-leading insurance brand through the genius of building an emotional connection with something as unemotional as insurance.

And they’ve actually been able to leverage kids’ pester-power to sell home and motor insurance, which must be a first.

Absolutely brilliant thinking. (I shall avoid the temptation to call it ‘simples’).

Simon Hayhurst

How to get better, faster, cheaper work from your creative agency

Imagine a client that wants to launch a new product that helps cats sit on mats.

The Marcomms Manager at the client briefs their agency.

After two weeks of locking themselves away, the agency turns up at the Marcomms Manager’s doorstep and unveil their meisterwork concept.

Visual: Cat sat on client’s mat.

Headline: “The Cat Sat On The Mat”

Bottom right: client logo.

Client’s reaction: “Brilliant! Brilliant! Bang on brief! Just got to get some approvals.”

A week later, the hapless account exec takes a call from the client.

“Brand team love the concept, but feel it’s a bit sedentary – we’re an active brand – can you change just one word? Change “Sat” to “Ran” – don’t change any other word, the rest of it is fine.

The agency meekly complies and resubmits the concept. But then, a week later, more client feedback:

“Product team love it, but forgot to say it’s a mat for dogs, not cats. Can you change ‘Cat’ in the headline to ‘Dog’ – don’t change any other word, the rest is fine”

Having been promised this is absolutely the only change, the agency again meekly complies.

Until, a week later…

“Got some more feedback. Marketing team love it, but feel that a bathtub would be more eye-catching than a mat, can we change the copy? They say don’t change anything else – the rest is fine”

Another week passes. Then, after the agency has re-worked the concept three times:

“Just got comments from Legal. They want to add an asterisk to show that ‘The product only works safely with certain animals – please contact us for further details’. They say “Don’t change anything else – the rest is fine”.

“Well an asterisk won’t kill a concept”, thinks the exec, and dolefully wanders through to the Creative department to give them the next instalment.

I’m guessing you can see the problem – each client department wants to change “just one thing” – but if each of them has their feedback taken on board, the concept the commissioning client “loved”:

The Cat Sat On The Mat

Becomes…

The Dog Ran On The Bathtub*

*The product only works safely with certain animals – please contact us for further details’

And of course the original visual is now meaningless.

Granted, the headline is the world’s most plodding creative execution of the proposition, and the amendments are exaggerated for effect – but – I hope the point is clear.

If everyone with the right to comment on a concept is asked to approve the brief to the agency in the first place, then much of the subsequent running-around-in-circles gets avoided.

The inherent contradictions in the underlying brief are then exposed, and the Marcomms manager can attempt to resolve them before the agency even gets a whiff of the brief.

Why is this important?

Here’s the thing: the agency’s charges to the client will reflect the time they have to invest on the client’s business. The more the time the client asks the agency to spend reworking a mis-briefed concept, the more the agency will want to bill the client next time.

Clients who repeatedly ask agencies to rework a concept – not because it was off brief, but because the brief was incomplete – end up paying far more for their work than they need to.

It also takes far longer to produce than it need.

And a compromise of a concept rarely ends up selling the product effectively. Which is surely the key objective.

This isn’t just the client’s fault, by the way. The agency exec needs to be far more probing when taking the brief in the first place to head off these issues before they appear.

Having worked both client and agency side over the years, I’ve seen this scenario played over many times.

(Indeed in the earliest stages of my career I was that client. And subsequently to my shame became that account exec).

I’ll blog separately about how to write a good brief.

But the first lesson for a client looking for better, faster, cheaper creative work is that you need to get everyone who’s allowed to comment on the creative work to agree the brief first.

Simon Hayhurst

Why you should always make the logo smaller

Many years ago I used to run graduate recruitment for an ad agency. As a warm up exercise on recruitment day, I asked each of the participants to write on the flipchart the name of the last newspaper or magazine they bought, and why they bought it.

One by one, up they got.

“Cosmo – for the problem page”

“Vogue – for the fashion advice”

“The Guardian – for the match report”

And so on.

There were 10 candidates in all, each of them vying to get a job at a London ad agency. Yet none of them claimed to have bought a publication with the intent of seeing who was advertising in it.

And why should they? None of us do – not even those of us who work(ed) in the industry.

Nor does anyone turn the TV or radio on in the hope of finding out who’s advertising. Nor do they open their web browser in the hope of seeing who will try and sell to them.

Yet still a handful of marketers obsess about making their logo bigger in an ad.

If making the logo bigger made folk more likely to read an ad, then agencies wouldn’t just make the logo bigger, they’d make it biggest.

Fact is, if we want folk to notice our ads it’s far more likely to be because of what we are selling than who is doing the selling.

Any visual ad – be it print or digital – only has a limited space for communication. The larger the space given over to who is advertising means the less space can be given over to what is being advertised (and more to the point, why you should buy it).

The way all great ads work in the customer’s mind is “That’s a great idea – who’s it from? Right – I’ll buy one today”.

Paradoxically, this means that the more space the logo takes up in the ad, the less likely the ad – and therefore the logo – will be noticed in the first place.

Simon Hayhurst

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonhayhurst/

December 2020

How to crystallise your proposition

Your proposition is the single-sentence answer to the question: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”.

Remember, you’re only allowed ONE reason. It’s the elevator speech for someone only going up one floor.

That single sentence ideally should have only ONE verb and ONE adjective.

Finding that one good reason is deceptively difficult. In order to be a genuinely good reason, it needs to satisfy these three criteria:

Is my proposition:

RELEVANT to my target audience?
DISTINCTIVE from what the competition are claiming?
Demonstrably TRUE?

Relevance comes from understanding what your target audience needs are. If your product doesn’t solve an identified need, then you need to think again.

Distinctiveness comes from understanding what the competition are saying. You won’t get cut-through by making the same promise that the competition is making.

Demonstrable truth comes from understanding what your product actually delivers. It’s tempting to over-promise, but this won’t drive repeat purchase, which is what most companies crave.

Try it. It’s not easy, but it is a tried-and-trusted framework if you want your proposition to have cut-through.

If you are in the business-to business market, and want help researching your own proposition with your target audience, please do get in touch at the address below.

Simon Hayhurst

February 2021