B2B Companies Discovering the Value of an Intangible Asset

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 10 July 2011 at 23:17 {one comment}

I’ve been getting a lot of interest in “branding” lately from B2B clients – coincidence? To some degree I’m taking it as a sign of a better economy (sluggish economy seems to be hurting B2B companies much less). These organizations are thinking about extending their offerings into new markets and to capitalize on new opportunities, and not just about selling more of the same to the same people.  That’s strategically riskier but it’s also the best way forward for significant growth. Imagine where Apple would be had it stopped with the iMac!

But about that risky part: These established organizations, some mid-sized, some large and global, are all nevertheless established, with a loyal customer base.  Their brands have come to mean something very real for those customers.  A quality brand is a precious asset – IBM’s brand is worth an estimated $60 billion. It needs to be treated with care.

And yet the fact is many B2B companies don’t have a clear understanding of what their brand really means. It’s not that they’re not collecting insights about their companies or products from customers. It’s usually more that they’re not bridging from the attributes customers like in their products to what the higher level benefits are that transcend products and have proven timeless.

What’s a brand? A brand is not spin. In fact, it’s authentically what customers believe about you. It’s what opens doors to new customers. It’s what makes the company sustainably distinctive even while it is getting harder and harder to differentiate on product attributes alone.

At Weber Shandwick, we develop Strategic Brand Frameworks to help clients clearly articulate their brand positioning. We recommend our clients spend some time articulating what their aspirations are for their brand. We call that defining the Brand Vision and it’s always the starting point. It gets at why you are undertaking this branding initiative at this point in time.

But at that point, you need to do some external research and have some discussions with customers and prospects. You should include your channel if it’s applicable (dealers, for instance). The purpose is to g to collect insights into both the functional and the emotional benefits your customers receive from your products and services. Functional attributes tend to be easier to deliver and therefore less differentiating and less motivating as message drivers. Emotional benefits are harder to deliver and, therefore, more differentiating and more motivating as message drivers. We need both, because the reality is they are related: You can plot these functional and emotional benefits on a “benefits ladder” and see how the functional attributes ladder up to emotional benefits.  From these benefits we can craft a brand positioning statement that lead to the central brand idea that is the basis for slogans, logos, campaigns and other creative expressions of the brand.

Especially for well-established brands, we then recommend quantitative research testing to ensure the brand positioning is optimized. And then you’re ready for the second half of the challenge, which is effectively communicating this freshly articulated brand and brand expression. But that’s a topic for another post.

In the meantime, here’s a fun and insightful video from Google’s Dan Cobley on how branding is like physics, from a TED talk:

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B2B Tech Opportunity

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 29 November 2010 at 19:17 {no comments}

Okay guys, if you want to see more blog posts from me, then you need to find me a good hire, because I have too much going on!  Here’s the official posting.

I’m a little flexible on just what level we hire because we can adjust the assignment accordingly, but I’m not looking for entry level and not looking for senior level.  Weber Shandwick is a heck of an agency and the Minneapolis office is a truly extraordinary place thanks to the most positive, respectful work culture I’ve ever experienced, a team of pros committed to staying on the cutting edge of PR, and great leadership. That’s my commercial. You won’t regret joining us.

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Measuring Outcomes in B2B Social Media – Part II: A Model

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 17 May 2010 at 06:56 {2 comments}

A few days ago, I blogged about the B2B roundtable we had here at Weber Shandwick Minneapolis, “Social Media and ROI: Dare We Talk About It?” And we did!

In that post, I summarized the first half of our message to attendees, which was that it was not a big deal to ignore ROI in our trial social media efforts of the past year because a small Investment required only a small Return. Now that we want to get serious and scale this, you better believe we need to talk about measuring real business outcomes.

But how do we do this?  A survey of our attendees showed most simply didn’t know where to start. Interestingly, Jim Estell blogs here that you can’t measure ROI for marketing at all, much less for social media, because it’s too complex. I’ll be the first to admit the proof of impact isn’t always definitive but if you’ve done the research to know your audience well, then this is certainly a do-able task in B2B because there is typically a defined purchase process where our efforts can have a clearer impact.

We have a measurement model for communications in general and it works for social media too.  (In other words, if you can measure business outcomes impact for any sort of marketing communications effort, you can certainly do it for social media. ) It’s called ARROW (see our little graphic).

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

ARROW Model for Communications Measurement

A = Activities. These are the things we generate. In social media land, that includes blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos or simply the number of web properties we are maintaining.  They get at a measurement of effort. On their own, however, they are meaningless.

R1 = Reach. Essentially number of eyeballs of our target audience we are reaching. We may measure this by Twitter followers or Facebook “friends” or blog page views. Important, but are we changing how our target audiences thinks or behaves?

R2 = Relevance. We sometimes use the word Resonance too. We want to measure that a message got through to our audience and that it connected with them. Relevance measurements can include key messages in third-party blog posts or tweets, number of retweets, blog comments, increases in site traffic or click throughs on a corporate blog to resources on your web site. Still not a business outcome.

O = Outcomes. Ideally, this is when our audience enters the sales pipeline in some way by requesting information or registering on your web site (i.e. becomes a lead) or when you sell more stuff, or when the quality of your leads improve or when your sales cycle shortens.

W = Any of the measures above divided by cost.

Ultimately, the goal is to find a corrolation between reach/relevance measurements and business outcome measurements. We are looking at evidence that the reach and relevance measures are in fact creating a better environment in which to sell. Don’t stop at measuring ARR!

If, despite a significant investment in marketing communications or social media efforts, no corrolation can be found, then you are right to question whether your dollars are being put to good use. What we’re looking for in choosing our reach and relevance measurements is whether or not they are precursors to ROI. How do you know?  Well, you can take the trial and error route to see if there are any corrolations, or better, you can conduct some good audience research before launching a major social media campaign to define what I’m calling the Awareness-to-Advocate Process Path, the average compositive path a prospect takes from awareness of the product category or your brand to being an advocate for your brand. That research significantly helps mitigate your risk of making a big investment in a program that delivers no return.  You still must measure the result to determine the strength of the impact.  More on that in another post!

Sorry for Being a Social Media Buzzkill

Filed under Discussion by Arikhanson on 16 June 2009 at 23:29 {one comment}

A fellow PR pro in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community, Aaron Pearson works as a senior vice president and vertical markets segment leader for the Global Technology Practice of Weber Shandwick, a leading public relations firm.With 15 years of B2B and technology communications experience, Aaron has spent time in the manufacturing, enterprise software, data storage and telecommunications industries. Aaron is also a member of the Business Marketing Association and holds an MBA in marketing from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. Without further introduction, take a read from this B2B Voices guest poster:

It’s interesting to me that so many of the conversations on Twitter among communications professionals concern social media – Twitter chief among them.I do appreciate many of them, (hey, Beers Who Twitter – Thanks @PaulDunay!) But there is a disconcerting, anything-can-work, dot-com boom feel about it.  

To be clear, I’m a huge cheerleader for the potential of social media and, more broadly, digital communications to elevate B2B communications programs. Who wouldn’t want to embrace communications channels that tend to be more measurable, more transparent, and more conversational? Research consistently shows that the most important form of marketing communications is word of mouth, and social media benefits from many of the personal, trusted characteristics of word of mouth.   

And yet, eight years after the dot-com bust, most of us still buy our groceries in a brick-and-mortar store even if we don’t make a mall run to buy music CDs anymore. There’s going to be a shake-out in social media (a real Twitpocalypse?) as people realize days are still 24 hours long, we have a finite amount of time to interact with each other, and in the face of competition, the business models of weaker communities show their flaws. (See Bloomberg, “MySpace Fires 30% of U.S. Workers.”) 

Our new online social web is here to stay, but for B2B marketers, it is no magic elixir to cure bad products or vague value propositions. We still need to use a battle-tested strategic planning process. What business outcome do we need to achieve? What insights does research give us into the needs of our audience, who they listen to, how they buy? Given those insights and our own creativity, what’s the right strategic approach, and how can we harness tactics both traditional and new in creative ways to ultimately accomplish those business objectives?

This may be boring and disappointing for some, but the alternative is costly failures like the Skittles experiment in the B2C realm as Razorfish’s Steven Cisowski outlined for us last week in Ad Age. Directionless innovation run amok.

According to a Feb. 20 Forrester report, “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers,” 68 percent of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes, a number that’s probably only grown since that information was collected in Q4 of last year. (Read more about it from analyst Laura Ramos’s original blog post.) And yet, social networks rank seventh in influencing technology purchase decisions, after web sites, sales people, traditional online or print media, trade shows, and of course, word of mouth.  

What I take away from this isn’t that digital communications and social media are relatively unimportant, but rather that they are increasing in importance rapidly yet the established channels aren’t going away.  Personal preferences for how individuals want to receive marketing information are fragmenting. Moreover – and this has always been the case – for complex, B2B purchases, the typical buyer is influenced at different stages in the buying process by different influencer channels. Fail to invest in one and you will fail to optimize your marketing dollars by missing leads you should have gotten, paying too much for them, or failing to convert enough into revenue. Invest in the wrong one – or do so unstrategically – and you basically just burn money (unless you get lucky). It’s getting harder, folks. 

As I was writing this, Phil Baumann, a registered nurse in Philadelphia, tweeted that, “Using Twitter as a be-all tool for healthcare is insane. There’s tons of ways to use it, but not w/out a brain.” Amen, and that goes for marketers, too.  Good luck out there.

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