"Do you know who we are?” he said, as if I was a complete idiot. No actually, we’ve spent the last six months trying to arrange this meeting because you’re so important we needed MI5 security clearance to leave a message on your voicemail…Yes, we ‘know who you are’.

But as I sat listening to a very (self) important marketing director waxing lyrical about his importance, it became clear that, ironically, he had no idea who he was. Certainly not at a corporate brand level. At the micro, ‘What am I doing for lunch today?’ level, this guy was focused. But at the macro, ‘What’s the direction for the (very famous) corporate brand I’m the guardian of?’ level, he had not a clue. Which irritated me. I tried not to let it bother me – this was the meeting of the century after all. Then I walked out. Oops.

But it raised the question in my mind – ‘What happens after awareness?’ Many small B2B brands struggle with achieving awareness or recognition or indeed any market cut-through – often for years. The single most quoted client objective that we hear at Birddog is, ‘To raise awareness’ (it’s usually followed with the word ‘and’, as in, ‘The objective is to raise awareness and achieve a whole host of impractical and unachievable other objectives with absolutely no budget whatsoever’).

Larger B2B brands however, have already achieved awareness. Loads of it. Their brands are visible in every magazine, on every street corner, on every website, in every office and probably in every home too. We know who they are. So then what?

Well, there’s the obvious, but insipid, ‘Maintain awareness’ objective (yawn). Then there’s the job security objective of, ‘Whatever you do, don’t change anything and don’t screw it up.’ And from what I can see, most clients and agencies stop at one of those two objectives on the basis the pay’s good and they get to spend their days saying, ‘Do you know who I am?’

But there is a clear nirvana for established brands – if only they had the vision to see it. It’s ‘love’ and ‘respect’. Two little words, both with a big impact on corporate reputation and profits. Once awareness has been achieved, love and respect is where the brand value lies.

Love and respect for a brand is what makes customers come back for more, tell their friends, forgive you when you make a mistake, stay loyal long after they should reasonably have tried the competition. Love and respect is what, for example, holds a marriage together. They’re very powerful emotions that are hard to achieve and harder to maintain. Certainly harder and more valuable than ‘awareness’ alone.

Without love or respect, you don’t have a brand, you have a product – a commodity. Copier paper. You’re going to have to work pretty hard to convince me to care about what I shove in the printer drawer. With a little bit of love, you have a fashion item, but it’s not a brand. It’ll last until the next best thing comes along – my Vaio laptop. With a little bit of respect you can achieve a good reputation – BlackBerry – but there’s no emotional bond that’s going to add the real value to the relationship.

It’s only when you achieve both love and respect that you really have a successful brand. I love my iPod. I respect Apple. I’ve forgiven it for only releasing the iPhone through the O2 network. Most other companies would probably have ruined their business with that strategy. Love and respect.

So awareness of the ‘big brands’ is actually just the start. It’s not the end point. It’s an advantage, it’s an opportunity, but it sure isn’t the Hollywood diva, ‘Do you know who I am?’ trump card. Show me some love and I’ll respect you in the morning. Honest.

It’s with much mirth that I read the story in today’s Marketing that The Economist’s sales have risen on the back of the credit crunch. Apparently readers are flocking to the magazine because of its unrivaled insight into business issues and therefore perspective on the currently situation. So what’s funny about that? Well nothing… except that according to Jacqui Kean, brand marketing director at the Economist (when I interviewed her last year) The Economist is “not a B2B brand.”

Business issues, she claimed, are only “part of our content, but so is politics, current affairs, and we also write about science, technology and the arts.”

So it’s just a coincidence that The Economist is doing well just as the economy goes to the wall? Hardly. Pull the other one Jacqui, it’s got bells on.

I have no problem with The Economist attempting to broaden its remit and content and appeal to a broader audience, but I am concerned that it appears to be deluding itself about what its role, audience and remit. Whether it likes it or not, it is known first and foremost for its excellent coverage of economic and business-related issues. Whether it can shift this perception over time remains open to question, but it seems unlikely.

Although no one seems to be hanging out with clients or suppliers on the weekends (they are getting direct mail), a lot seem to have shared their profile on Facebook or joined communities with people they are dealing with on a professional level. They say it is because they are trying to develop a relationship, but does this mean you should have become “friends” online?

Someone who is very sociable can easily meet people in their professional and personal lives, but are they the same person in both? Whatever I get up to on the weekend should have no effect on how I am viewed professionally or scupper a deal when I get back to work on Monday. Social media has changed this; Policemen who post their profiles on facebook are eliminating themselves from ever doing undercover work, HR departments check profiles of perspective employees and students are kicked out of Cambridge for posting the wrong pictures. 

Should the word ‘Social’ cover our personal as well as professional lives?

I know that we are all slaves to our trade and love our work, but is it really where we should be spending our social life? Is attending an awards ceremony or an industry summer drinks, a social event? I have been convincing my wife to be, that it definitely is not and so does not count as a night out - no matter how drunk I am when I get home.

Don’t get me wrong I think we should all be blogging, commenting, writing articles and opinion pieces - but is this us acting in a social or professional environment?  If you are compelled to publish your feelings for “primates in peril” on BBC.com or when rating the Florence holiday on trip advisor – do you post your comment as Ed Weatherall from London or Edward Weatherall, MD Concep Ltd?

When we are contributing with our business cards in hand, are we giving our personal opinions or talking on behalf of the company? If I left Concep, and joined the B2C world, would I continue with this blog? Would Joel and James meet me for Lunch?

I feel we will always have two hats, the business man and the family man. There is room for both, but they should not be expected to behave the same.

News that IDMF has been acquired and almost certainly closed down by UBM poses question marks over the future of trade fairs in the procurement process for marketing products and services. For almost two decades, IDMF was the main event in the marketing exhibition calender, and even though it had shrunk in recent years, its absence will leave a void. Does its demise mean that trade shows are no longer play a significant role in the procurement of marketing products and services? Has the Internet rendered them redundant? Or do marketers still relish the opportunity for face-to-face contact with prospective suppliers?

Please respond before 12/08/08.
The best responses will be edited for publication in the September 08 edition of B2B Marketing.

"How can I use blogs on third party sites to promote my products in a way which does not appear overtly commercial and therefore compromise the neutrality of the forum?"

Question posed by Suzannah Povey of IQPC

Is the downturn an opportunity? It is if you’re in business PR, apparently. I’m getting slightly naffed-off with attempts to use the current economic climate as an attempt to justify the promotion of a random – and totally unrelated – product or service. In particular I’m getting fed up with the growing number of press releases I am receiving with headlines like “new pencil sharpener is essential for businesses seeking to get through the credit crunch”.
My favourite was the proposal for an article that I received a few weeks ago which suggested that marketers’ best response to the down turn would be to implement a CRM system – are they crazy? Spending vast amounts of time, money and patience on an application that is odds-on to deliver nothing is precisely the last thing they should do in this situation. Which is what I told them.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not an idiot. I understand the PR black art of spinning bad news into an opportunity. But I just think there are too many brands are stretching credibility here and are actually turning journalists and prospects alike away from their message. In other works, an own goal. I’m getting a definite sense of déjà vu at this point… I’m sure I’ve ranted about this before.
But what should marketers focus on in a downturn? Well, we’re covering this in a feature in our September edition – look out for it. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. Please feel free to comment below.
In the meantime, if you’re in PR, for God’s sake stop trying to tie everything in to the credit crunch. Or at the very least, if you do, don’t email me about it.

For a while at Base One we’ve been questioning the logic of the single big idea as the basis of a brand’s campaigns. Having spent years creating consistent and compelling campaigns around a single idea, why change? It’s been proven to work and buyers are still buyers surely?

Well yes, and no. The fact is that Buyers are changing as this extract from a post by Chris Tacy, Chief Innovation Officer at Brand Experience Agency, Method implies:

 … now we have an entire new demographic who have grown up not having to take it. And as a result, the control relationship between brands and consumers has changed. And it's not going back. Technology has helped - but behavior is a big part of this. And at then end of the day... the chickens are coming home to roost.

In this new world... The Big Idea doesn't really hold water. Without the control relationship on the side of the brands, it's not even justifiable. [http://method.com/#/thoughts/ideasculture/detail/WpPost/17/]

It’s this change of relationship that is making us rethink. Brand owners have to realise that they will no longer have control of what people think or say about them. We can influence what they say and think but not control it. And our buyers fit many Persona we know that and for each of them the brand can mean different things. Therefore, we need to start developing clusters of brand ideas that can be relevant to different groups, and yet all relevant to the brand.

Strong brands in the future (even B2B brands) need to resonate as part of the sub-cultures that exist within our markets. Sub-cultures are different yet they overlap, so too must the ideas we place at the centre of our brands.

Given the alarming rate at which B2B data decays, how do you find the right data cleansing or data hygiene solution for your needs, from the many different options available?

Regular readers will have already noted my admiration for all things Apple, but also my dismay that its recent marketing has sought to distance itself from its B2B heritage. This was illustrated in its campaign using comics Mitchell & Webb, suggesting the PC is for work, and the Mac is for home – ironic given that it was the design and publishing industries that kept Apple alive in the 1990s. I can’t blame Apple for moving with the times, but it seemed rather disingenuous to abandon its heritage and – more importantly – its core market in such a fickle fashion.
So naturally my heart was warmed by the news that Apple has had a road to Damascus-style change of heart, and is refocusing on the corporate sector for its iPhone product. The logic would seem to be simple: to take on BlackBerry, which is rapidly developing a stranglehold on the business mobile telephony market, where both usage and functional requirements are growing rapidly, making it highly lucrative.
Ironically, Apple’s bid to re-engage with corporate users comes at precisely the same time as a change in direction by rival Blackberry – targeting the consumer sector, and positioning it as a lifestyle tool rather than business accessory. As discussed in our news analysis article, in effect each one is moving into the other’s territory, and creating potentially bitter rivals from two brands which until recently would seem to have little overlap.
This potentially sets up a fascinating conflict between two of the leading lights of the technology industry. What both must consider, however, is that they don’t neglect their existing brand strengths and loyal audiences in the pursuit of new ones. Particularly in the current climate, woe betide brands that fail to keep existing clients happy whilst heading off into new territory.

I stumbled out of bed, went downstairs and staggered through the Saturday morning ritual of forcing as much finely ground coffee into the espresso maker as is physically possible, to achieve the necessary caffeine hit to deal with the kids’ inexplicable enthusiasm for early morning daylight – which had been audible for several hours earlier.

The next stage, prior to Saturday’s light fluffy pancakes – griddle baked to a golden brown, lovingly stroked with lightly salted butter and smothered with lashings of Canadian maple syrup – was to open the post whilst waiting for the caffeine to make sense of the weekend. So as I sat in the kitchen wearing little more than my nightie and curlers, I was more than a little put out to open a mailer from a publishing house announcing that as a director of Birddog I had been identified as one of the UK’s most successful businessmen and that my profile had been ‘chosen’ to be listed in the said publisher’s directory of most-brilliant-awesome-people 2008.

The mailer told me, at some considerable length, how well wicked I was, how well wicked they were as publishers and what a complete privilege it was for me to be selected for inclusion into this few, this happy few, this band of brothers. I was to be honoured. I was to receive the attention I so rightly deserved. I was to be applauded for my unsurpassed business acumen – and could I please just visit their website and complete further details about how truly magnificent I absolutely am.

I immediately fired up my laptop (not my favourite Saturday morning pre-caffeine activity), located the publisher’s website and searched for the ‘shove it’ button. Duly located, I told them where to go and hope never to be distracted from my pancakes and Canadian maple syrup again.

I’ve never been a big fan of sending business communications into the home – but nor have I realised how vehemently opposed to it I quite clearly am. I’m aware that company directors’ home addresses are readily available from Companies House and I have regular discussions with clients seeking to reach a senior executive audience about whether or not they should use a home address database. I always advise ‘not’ – and now I know why. I can’t actually recall another such mailing that I’ve received at home – either because it hasn’t happened before, or just because I’ve simply refused to engage with it and put it straight in the bin. But this one was different.

I regret to admit that the difference was that I nearly fell for it. Flattery, ego-massage, self-gratification… all of those things are powerful response-generators. I like to think I have a healthy and well-formed opinion of my own ego so I should have loved this. And here’s the thing. If I’d received this mailer at work, I probably would have loved it. The publisher would have been able to build a rather astonishing database of directorial detail that I would otherwise be unlikely to tell my own pedicurist. Instead, they got nothing.

It may well be that the publisher was genuinely just seeking to publish a directory of the great and the good of British business and I’ve just scored an accomplished own-goal. But it didn’t feel right. It felt like an invasion of privacy that, if left unattended, would lead from the database to a mountain of other unsolicited business communications in the home.

There’s work – and there’s the weekend. They’re related, no doubt. But nothing should ever get in the way of screaming kids and Canadian maple syrup.