B2B Marketing Blog
October 2009 Archives

Does B2B marketing take itself too seriously?

October 29, 2009 4:52 PM | By Guest Blogger
By Anna Goldie, online editor, B2B Marketing I ask this because opinion has been divided on our story yesterday about Arnie the Armadillo. Arnie has been dreamt up by Kingsbridge Professional Solutions (KPSol) to promote its business insurance and the critter is appearing on the KPSol website and starring in his own short film. KPSol has been explicit about wanting to create the same association between the animated armadillo and professional risk mitigation in the B2B market as the Churchill bulldog or Compare the Market meerkat have with personal insurance in the B2C market. While some of us have welcomed...
12 comments | Full story

The dark side of B2B marketing

October 29, 2009 11:58 AM | By Joel Harrison
Ever wondered why it’s so hard to get your marketing message infront of senior decision makers? Well some new research might just have found the answer. According to a study by Psychological Consultancy, decision makers are increasingly under the influence of so-called ‘dark side’ personality traits. In fact, the research claims that as much as 85 per cent of business leaders are prone to eleven different kinds of dark side characteristics, which break through in times of stress. It paints an alarming picture of a workplace dominated by sinister, malevolent despots with unknown powers and capacity for evil. Yes, it...
3 comments | Full story

What the hell is a challenger brand, and what makes it so yummy?

October 28, 2009 4:53 PM | By Paul Cash
Any company, product or brand that is either No.2 or No.22 in its category or market has the potential to be a challenger brand. Think of the challenger as the underdog, the pirate, the rule breaker and you get the picture. What makes the challenger unique is that it looks at the conventions adopted by the market (niche or otherwise) and seeks to disrupt the status quo by offering a new perspective on the category or the market as a whole. This can often be driven by technology or service level innovations, challenging the existing price-models of the category or...
1 comments | Full story

Is Breast Always Best?

October 26, 2009 5:16 PM | By John Williams
That was indeed the question I mulled over when travelling home from the recent B2B Marketing conference on lead generation. It’s not often that I think about breasts, and that may have been the result of too much wine, but the parallels between lead nurturing and breast feeding suddenly struck me. You see, there is a line. Like breast feeding, you can nurture for too long and before you know it you’re the subject of a Channel 4 documentary with two seven year olds clamped limpet-like to your teats. You enjoy the contact, the interaction, the reliance and it makes...
2 comments | Full story

Why does the world spin around

October 21, 2009 9:30 PM | By Iain Lovatt
A vexing question but one that only the youngest amongst us seek an answer to as we have deemed to have grown out of asking such simple questions by the time we hit five or six.  But why does the earth spin around?  I don't know or if I did I have forgotten the answer now I have reached the big 50 plus. Bring on the Omega 3 and fish oils to help me lubricate those old memory cells. But now I am at the top of the tree such questions are below me to ask. I need to seek...
2 comments | Full story

Have a merry merry ....

October 20, 2009 11:55 AM | By Edward Weatherall
I actually wrote this blog last year but was persuaded by my business partner, to just leave it. Now we are having exactly the same conversations, internally as well as with clients and I cannot be silenced anymore.   What is wrong with Happy Christmas?   My business partner says, “No, it’s Season’s Greetings, we don’t want to offend anyone.”   Who are we going to offend?   So the question is - would anyone be offended if a company card said “Have a Merry Christmas”? We are wishing good will to all. Every shop we walk past from as...
16 comments | Full story

Why are postal workers not a special case

October 13, 2009 4:58 PM | By Iain Lovatt
Why do certain groups assume they are a special case? Why are some groups not impacted by the changes happening in the world right now?As far as I can understand the postal workers want to save the postal service for the country and are fighting the modernisation proposed by the management (real 70's speak here, anyone else remember Red Robbo of Longbridge and how well did he do?)In reality the public are no longer interested in the postal service. The market has declined and the decline is accelerating, people use the internet to shop and communicate and the postal service is as...
4 comments | Full story

Oh Hugh, tell me you didn't mean it...

October 13, 2009 9:31 AM | By Francesca Brosan
The good thing about having a blog is apparently that you can have a rant.  So here goes. Utterly depressed to read the FT article “Companies plan to cut marketing agencies” .  Not for the obvious reasons, because in our heart of hearts we know that clients work with far too many agencies. We just want it to be us, not the competition, which is why we go on trying to get in the door.    No, the real reason I was depressed was the comment from Hugh Burkitt, CEO of The Marketing Society.   “Online and direct marketing are...
3 comments | Full story

Why marketing counts for so little

October 13, 2009 8:52 AM | By Iain Lovatt
My recent experience with my mobile phone service provider has made me re think the value of what we do for clients and how we should approach the marketing of products and services in future.   The service provider in question is a client of ours at Blue Sheep and spends a not inconsiderable sum of money with us and we in turn have a dozen data cards on the business with them and the family have three phones that consume on average £150 worth of hard earned money each and every month. I like the brand I love the...
1 comments | Full story

Picture perfect?

October 9, 2009 12:20 PM | By Julie Clare
The thorny issue of photos cropped up again this week. Photos and pictures are at the heart of much of what we do, whether it’s media relations and supplying photos alongside copy to the magazines, or whether we’re putting together corporate literature. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the advent of digital photography is that everyone thinks they can take photos themselves. In bygone days when I was an exec, getting professional photography taken at the beginning of a campaign was par for the course. Now it’s fallen out of fashion as clients discover their inner David Bailey. Or...
2 comments | Full story

What do YOU want to see in B2B Marketing?

October 9, 2009 11:18 AM | By Joel Harrison
...OR: Social media experiment number 34: Crowdsourcing Regular readers will have noted our ongoing social media experiments – I figure that it’s a whole new world, and if we can publicly trial these new techniques and tools then it might be of some benefits to readers. Hopefully you’ve already joined the LinkedIn Group and viewed our videos on Youtube. The latest experiment comes on the back of Scot McKee’s last blog, which was on the subject of crowdsourcing, and follows the question which I find myself desperately trying to answer this time each year: “what the hell are we going...
3 comments | Full story

Keeping the lines of communication open

October 7, 2009 5:17 PM | By Scot McKee
I’ve been talking to people about ‘crowdsourcing.’ They’ve listened to me, and then looked at me like I’m a twat. So I started to doubt my own visionary brilliance and thought maybe I’d best shut up. But then again, I’ve never been one to run from a stupidity contest so I thought I’d persevere. In years to come you can all look back and say, “That McKee bloke – genius.” Or, alternatively, “twat.” Crowdsourcing broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. Rather than rely on a single person within an organisation, whole companies their clients and people...
6 comments | Full story

Data Q&A: Data vendors

October 5, 2009 11:00 AM | By Joel Harrison
Are all B2B data vendors the same? Is all B2B data the same? What factors should marketers consider when seeking to buy B2B data?...
7 comments | Full story

Is limited internet access an issue when engaging businesses with Social Media?

October 2, 2009 1:15 PM | By Gifford Morley-Fletcher
I was recently talking on Social Media Marketing for B2B at a conference when I was asked the following question: 'Many of my clients and potential clients work for financial and government institutions, where internet access is limited, and sites and tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are forbidden. What's the point of incorporating Social Media into your marketing strategy if your target audience can't use it at work?' My first reaction was to rail against 'big brother' companies, limiting their employees' access to harmless but useful information, but this wasn't going to solve anything, let alone answer the...
3 comments | Full story
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