B2B Marketing: Does your brand creative have to be bland creative?
Most agencies feel that B2B sector creative has to be boring and academic. But why?
I have been looking around at the majority of B2B marketing and I feel that it’s time to raise the bar. It’s typically strictly informational and not very sexy at all. I think it’s time to make B2B sexy too. (Not talking to you Cisco or Intel.)
B2B doesn’t need to be more conservative or buttoned up than B2C. That’s just the agency excuse for not taking risks with an audience we have not really taken the time to understand. B2B doesn’t have to be so technical that you need to be an engineer to make sense of the copy. We are creative people. We are writing ads, not technical manuals. We need to remember that even though we are marketing to businesses, we are still speaking to the people who run those businesses.
We need to remember that companies don’t buy anything. It’s not the companies that sign the cheques, and it’s not the company that says yes – it’s the people. When those people get home and kick off their work shoes, do they suddenly transform into the people that respond to great advertising? Not likely. Even at work, they are the same people who want great tasting soup, great hair color, and the cereal that makes you skinny.
The B2B buying process is radically different. Ultimately businesses (and the people who buy for them) buy products and services because it’s the most defensible purchase. They buy not to feed desire, but rather, to prevent themselves from being challenged and/or fired. Creative B2B work comes from understanding the people inside the companies who make decisions about your products.
What we know is, really effective and sexy creative comes from getting passionate about the products and telling a human focused story about them. But most importantly, making B2B sexy is about taking away the permission we have given ourselves as marketing professionals to do mediocre work because it’s for B2B. There’s a lot of opportunity to do great B2B work and a lot of clients would probably flock to the agencies doing it. Let’s bring sexy back.
