B2B Marketing Blog
May 2009 Archives

Please don't tell me we have five minutes to get this out!

May 29, 2009 9:57 AM | By Edward Weatherall
I think we have to take a bit of perspective on time critical events, when looking at email marketing.The time you send an email, does not guarantee when it will be opened, so if you are struggling to get content or creative signed off and you wanted to send it at 14 hundred hours, take a step back and a deep breath. There are a lot of factors that make 2pm not that important.  The other part of this crazy behaviour is if the message you are getting out there is so important why is it only sitting in one...
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Which B2B brands do you trust?

May 20, 2009 12:14 PM | By Andrew Dalglish
I recently stumbled across the Reader’s Digest survey of Britain’s most trusted brands. One finding jumped out at me: the most trustworthy margarine is Flora. ‘I’ve never trusted a margarine,’ I thought. ‘I trust my doctor, my friends, my local policeman; not a margarine’. But the idea got me thinking. I do trust brands that I’m familiar with, that are of a consistently high quality and live up to promises. This trust represents a useful shorthand for the best choice in a world of increasing complexity. So I decided that I do indeed trust a margarine. I also trust a...
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Employees as Brand Carriers

May 18, 2009 11:30 AM | By Edward Appleton
  Many b2b companies have been in and out of private ownership over the past 10 years, gone through mergers, takeovers, with the concommitent churn in staff, sense of insecurity, loss of implicit knowledge and know-how.....in a word, the whole corporate culture shrinks in on itself. What's left nowadays? People working in fear of their jobs, lacking any identity with their employer.   So is the sense of a corporate culture which underpins any strong brand dead? Not in my experience. Micro-units of people in all sizes of companies, in whatever turbulent times they are going through, carry the seeds...
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Acquired brands - ditch or nuture?

May 13, 2009 3:08 PM | By Edward Appleton
 When a company is taken over – what should happen to the swallowed company’s brands?   Mergers and acquisitions have characterised many B2B markets for at least the last 10 years – the recent Dow takeover of Rohm and Haas, and BASF’s takeover of Ciba show how valuable consolidation is perceived by senior management, even in the current credit crunch environment.   Much of the communication  relating to the rationale of any merger focuses on “synergies”, and we all know what that means. But what about the brands acquired? When a company’s history stretches back over decades, it’s clear...
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Time to think (and work) smarter

May 11, 2009 11:41 AM | By Joel Harrison
Don’t you just hate clichés? Don’t they drive you up the wall? Let’s face it; marketing is full of them. And here’s one that I bet all marketers have heard over the last nine months: ‘work smarter’. In my book, it’s right up there with ‘win-win situation’ and ‘adding value’ in terms of its annoyance potential, but unfortunately, it does have resonance in these times – which makes it all the more irritating. Everyone’s being asked to go that extra mile, to work that bit harder to meet targets and to achieve objectives. And if they value their job, most...
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Data Q&A: Email data

May 8, 2009 11:36 AM | By Joel Harrison
Is it possible to purchase reliable third party business email data? If so, what factors should be considered when evaluating purchase? What alternatives are there?...
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Small is the new big

May 6, 2009 1:04 PM | By Stuart Small
Now I know what you’re thinking: you cant go five minutes without seeing an expression claiming that something is the new something –  ‘staying in is the new going out’, ‘Thursday is the new Friday’,  ‘grey is the new black’, etc. You get the picture.But when I saw the above expression I was struck by it and not just because of the link to my surname!Recently I have been speaking to many suppliers who serve small businesses, and I was pleased to hear that this segment remains robust. For example, UK company formations and set up support is strong and...
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