B2B Marketing Blog
Recently by Edward Appleton

A Collaborative Approach to Communications and Brand Building

November 9, 2009 5:53 PM | By Edward Appleton
I’ve lead a number of workshops over the past few months with b2b organisations looking to create an identity for themselves and are not quite sure how to go about it. They have a couple of things in common   a)     a broad base of external stakeholders with whom they need to communicate b)  very scientific in their approach, often using technical terms that are only understood       internally   Helping companies communicate a relatively complicated value proposition, that resonates with a number of b2b audiences with differing agendas is the sort of task that good consultancies relish.   Approaching...
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Is Marketing Just a Sales Support Function in B2B?

June 15, 2009 1:36 PM | By Edward Appleton
  I recently attended a sales and marketing workshop designed to improve the interaction between marketing and sales. It was moderated by an external consulting company, results I have yet to see, but here’s the take out as I saw it.   Marketing in b2b doesn’t sit naturally in the organisational driving seat as it would in a b2c organisation – its internal influence depends on General Management’s positioning of marketing.   Sales people, especially those managing large key accounts, have a lot of customer knowledge and thereby power and know it. This can be an advantage if leveraged correctly....
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Bottom-Up Branding – or How to Make an Impact without Creating Chaos

June 7, 2009 6:13 PM | By Edward Appleton
 So, as I was saying…..branding in B2B seems to be a sort of white space area, with the marketing people in the workshops I lead very open to the idea of investing more time and energy on it.   A topic which raised much discussion was which type of branding would make most sense for operational b2b marketers, and how to execute simply. Most of the strong b2b brands identified  – ABB, Bosch, BASF for example – were corporate brands, managed at top management level, and with CEO approval necessary, encompassing multiple business units. Many in the groups found this prospect daunting,...
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Workshop: Are B2B Brands so different from B2C Brands?

June 1, 2009 11:39 AM | By Edward Appleton
How do b2b brands differ from b2c brands? What are the rules for creating a strong b2b brand in the age of social networking, and how do they differ from those of a b2c brand? I gained some interesting insights in workshops I conducted recently with a team of b2b marketing professionals coming up with their views – I split the session into two groups to cover either the b2b or a b2c perspective.   So – the strong b2b brands mentioned (ABB and Bosch were quoted) were regarded as leaders in their category, omnipresent, with a broad range of...
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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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