“Who remembers Google Glass? What were all that about?” It’s almost a decade since Google announced that the Explorer Edition of Google Glass was going on sale at $1,500 a pop, offered initially to Google I/O developers in the US. For digital natives too young to remember that far back, Google Glass was …
Category archives: B2B Marketing
Vorsprung Durch Branding
Once upon a time, in the days when the world wide web was just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes and direct mail was an actual *thing*, I started out on my career in marketing. The financial services company I worked for had recently appointed BBH’s newly-formed below-the-line* agency Limbo to work on its direct …
Selling to a business? To be on the short list, you first have to be on the long list – here’s how
Since the dawn of B2B marketing, there seems to have been a raging debate about whether B2B buyers act more rationally than consumers. Classicists argue that the business procurement process is designed to eliminate irrationality and engender accountability across the entire purchase process. The involvement of multiple B2B stakeholders in that process helps ensure that …
How hard can it be to stand out from the crowd when everyone is identically dressed?
I was recently tasked with reviewing the thought leadership output of several hundred law firms in the US and UK for a major client desk research project. Something that struck me upon clicking through the home pages of site after site after site was how distinctive the first impressions created by most of them seemed …
Why marketers need to wrestle back control of the “other” Ps
When most people start out in a marketing career, the very first thing they learn is that the success of any marketing activity rests on the 4 P’s – the product you are selling, the price you sell it at, the places you sell it in, and the way those three things are promoted. …
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Beating the Billable Hours Behemoth
My heart goes out to those professional services marketing mangers who are constantly having to cajole partners in their firm to contribute something to the company blog. “I’m tasked with hitting my billable hours, not writing window dressing for the website” goes the standard rebuttal. And if you live or die in a …
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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