B2B Marketing
A little while back a former colleague of mine was invited to a job interview where they were asked to make a short presentation on “the barriers to innovation in Professional and Financial Services”. As a prep for their interview, they asked for my opinion, and I – in turn – asked my own …
Continue reading “Fear and Loathing in Professional & Financial Services”
In a recent piece in Marketing Week, the The B2B Institute‘s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo opined on how AI is going to positively impact B2B market research. As the authors testify, it’s certainly true that there’s plenty of positive advances that AI can contribute to the research process: for example, augmenting questionnaire design by using ChatGPT to suggest answer sets to quantitative …
Continue reading “Why AI isn’t killing B2B research just yet”
Imagine for a moment there are two luxury car brands. Let’s call them…oooh, I dunno…Mercedes and BMW. Let’s imagine both are facing a downturn in sales as inflationary pressures bite into household expenditure, and customers think they’ll delay renewing their existing model for another year. (No idea if this is true, by the way, but …
Continue reading “Why savvy marketers aren’t abandoning brand investment just yet”
A couple of weeks back on LinkedIn, I posted a link to an article that hailed the advent of the Metaverse as new tech that would completely revolutionise businesses everywhere. The article was sponsored by a management consultancy urging CEOs to get on board with this brand new disruptive tech before their own company gets …
Continue reading “Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing”
A proposition is a very simple thing. It’s the response to the request: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”. Yet too often in B2B marketing when faced with that request we lapse into what is known as the Elevator Speech. The Elevator Speech itself is a simple concept. You’re standing …
Continue reading “Why we B2B marketers need to sharpen our propositions (and how to do it).”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “When the secret of successful brand research really is simplicity”
