Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We're talking about brand. We're even trying to define it. Understand what makes a good brand and how you can make your brand better. Views, thoughts, and commentary for clients and agencies. Brought to you by Good, a brand consultancy based in the UK.
Stewart
Oh, welcome to the Good Brand Podcast. My name is Stewart Steel. I am joined as ever by Chris Lumsden. Hi, Julie Murdoch. Hello. And we work for Good Brand Consultancy based in the United Kingdom, but work globally. And today we are having a conversation with Chris And Chris has got, you know, it's something that we've talked about for a long period of time. And Chris has finally done it. Chris has, well, you know,
Chris
we've released something. What have you done?
Stewart
The world kind of, you shared it with the world today. What did you share?
Chris
A report, Stewart. And I thought what we're rather grandly calling an industry report called Brand Dynamics in B2B Tech, The Current Landscape.
Stewart
So just go into a little bit. So what is this report? What does it kind of cover?
Chris
It covers, I would describe it as a collection of all of our kind of key learnings and thoughts around the challenges and issues around that we see in B2B tech.
Julie
Right.
Chris
And, you know, some thoughts on how we solve those problems. It's been banging around in our heads for a while because, you know, in this space that we've been working in for a while, we see the same thing again and again, right? Right. And it felt sensible to try and pull all of that stuff together to create a document or a compendium of…
Stewart
Compendium? A compendium. We
Julie
sit in the bar and act and say. Yeah,
Chris
your compendiums. Around, you know, outlining a lot of the challenges that we see and, you know, some of the pitfalls and the many, many, we see many clients making. Does that make sense?
Stewart
It does make sense. So you don't need to, because obviously we want people to read the report, but just give us a flavour of, for example, one of the areas that you cover off in the report as a kind of example of
Chris
what can
Stewart
be expected.
Chris
So in the report, I think there's six or seven areas or eight areas that I say, look, here are key things that we see that are impacting the performance of B2B tech brands. Well, there are two that I think are worth mentioning. The first one is just that it's quite a general, a generalized observation that many, many B2B tech brands don't see brand as a business critical thing at all. In fact, they don't really care about it at all. They just think it works in isolation. And, you know, and it's about colors and logos. And we've made this point before, but I think it's the single biggest challenge trying to get organizations to take it seriously. I mean, it's not our job to make them take it seriously, but if they do want to take it seriously, then we can help them. But I think that's one of the biggest challenges because it plays into the last point, I think, which is equally, it's kind of relevant, which is about the fact that most of the creative is really, really dull. And because if you don't take the brand seriously, then your output's going to be really dull. And I talk about them being, you know, they rely on a kind of tired set of visual metaphors to communicate what they do, things like networks and connectedness and they have these very bold statements about bringing tomorrow's future here today and all that stuff that we talk about. But equally, we lean on some other people's stuff as well, talking about what role creativity has in affecting successful brands, successful businesses. And it just says that, there's a stat in here from Peter Field that says 77% of B2B ads score just one star out of five in effectiveness, which underscores the kind of crisis in B2B branding and advertising. So, you know, those two points, I suppose, in combination, in concert, add up to the fact that this sector doesn't take it seriously enough and it's missing. It's missing out.
Julie
I was just going to, I think that, and you talk about, I know we're not going to talk about it, but you kind of, in the overview section, you sort of split out the sort of three different types of B2B tech organisations and we kind of have, I guess, a disproportionate amount of experience in that kind of B2B tech product innovator space. And I think as you've kind of, when you talk about, you know, the characteristics of those companies and B2B tech in general, I guess, are generally, and from our experience, are very product driven, engineering led. And I think that, you know, your first point about not taking brands seriously is very much related. It's kind of built from that because we had Ryan Schultz, didn't we, a client on the podcast a few months back talking about how excited these businesses get talking about the technology. And it's almost like they kind of bypass brand and go straight to talking about the tech and how smart it is and forget the kind of Mark Ritson saliest point around, you know, but do they know you and do they know what they know you for first off? And then you can get into talking about it. So I think it's, like you say, it's interesting that, you know, you see this consistently in that kind of
Chris
bypassing. But we do, don't we? We see it all the time. It's the same kind of issues that are raised. And I think, you know, it's really frustrating because, you know, because we see it all the time and clients in their lifetimes probably don't see it as often because we're doing it all the time. And so you recognize it quickly and you can diagnose it quickly. And it's very frustrating that, you know, you're thinking, well, why can't this be, why can't you get this right? But I suppose the observation is that it's easy in theory. That's the difference between theory and practice, isn't it? Because you never come at this from the start. You're always jumping in the middle at some point and there's reasons why things can't be done. But it's not difficult at all. I mean, it's very far from difficult. It's very straightforward. But it's about trying to spin as many plates as you can and solve as many of these challenges as you can. Sometimes it's not as simple as just wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch.
Stewart
I do think, though, that you can kind of understand where that ambivalence comes from. Because if you look at the most successful business in the world, just now nvidia
Julie
and
Stewart
so on one hand you if you're a bit if you're a night if you're not if you're looking at it naively you go well gpus the product is what's driving that that market cap and
Julie
you can run
Stewart
with it and it's like the fact that there's other things but again nvidia have been it's the combination of having a great product and nvidia have been branding for years i
Julie
mean they're
Stewart
not they've not necessarily been out there it was a very niche market it was to gamers around around video game cards and that's the kind of main thing they did and they did a lot of branding to that group because you it was trying to create the values of nvidia about you know gaming performance and everything else with their product to kind of make that align so it's always i think it's always interesting i can see why people
Chris
yeah and i think that that example
Julie
sorry
Chris
i mean nvidia is you know is in has been in the right place at the right time
Julie
and is surfing a
Chris
huge wave that you can't sit around and wait for that. And they're exceptional and it's
Julie
unbelievable.
Chris
Assume you are not
Julie
NVIDIA.
Chris
Assume that's not going to happen to you. Most, the vast majority of brands in this B2B tech space, especially in that sort of product innovator stuff and even that industrial manufacturer space, they're going to have to get,
Stewart
they're going to have to... I would disagree a little bit with that because, I mean, while I agree they're the right place, right time, their branding beforehand around performance to a certain sector did help them and did help them capitalise on that market.
Julie
But you
Stewart
don't think it's looking at it fresh.
Chris
The market dynamics in that space changed everything. And, you know, again, I just go back to the point of saying that as a brand, a strategy of sitting, waiting and hoping that the market's going to, you know,
Julie
all the gods
Chris
are going to align and you're going to surf a wave to global domination. That's not going to happen. No, but the brand did help. Yeah, but it doesn't need to necessarily be
Speaker 4
global domination, but kind of elevate your success, even if it's not in that extreme example. I think the frustration we've seen or had, and we had this conversation literally this morning about when you combine sort of product launch and you bring in new products to market in the B2B tech space. Or when we are involved in working on product launches in the B2B tech space, and then you end up trying to do a brand and a product job in one. and it's like you know the the product you know even where you've got a great product you're still trying to underpin it with the fact that you can trust it and believe it because those brand value you know because that brand value is there that brand salience is there and so you end up trying to do the two things in the one campaign and both of them probably get compromised i get you know the quit if you then say well what why you know why why is the value of brand underappreciated and that you know and it you know does it come back to how difficult it is to measure the impact you know it's like if a product's good it sells
Julie
how much more have you sold because
Speaker 4
the brand is structure you know i mean it's that kind of ability to
Chris
and i think you know the thrust behind the whole thing is just to try and pull all our knowledge and demonstrate you know i guess some sort of sort of domain expertise and you know we've seen it before but it's to try and stress the fact that the businesses that do begin to see brand as a sort of strategic asset do better do better
Julie
yeah
Stewart
do better undoubtedly that's why i think the video got to the top because I think they were already positioned as performance as good
Chris
as everything else.
Stewart
And then
Julie
the launch on the back of that. And
Stewart
the market then kind of capitalized on that and the brand helped. So who do you think should be downloading this report? Who should be reading this?
Chris
I'd say people that are in the B2B tech space, and they don't necessarily need to be in marketing because it's very accessible. I think senior leaders, decision makers, Because people that already are at a point where they understand that they may be or suspect that they need to do something with their brand. As I said before, our job isn't to convince people who don't think they need to do something with their brand that they need to, because we'll never do that. But if there are people in that space, then I think it would be, it might be quite interesting for them to take a whirl through it and see if they recognize themselves in any of the observations.
Stewart
Yeah, I think it's the kind of people who go, wait a minute, why is our business not,
Chris
you
Stewart
know, we do have a great product. Why is it not selling? Why are people not getting it? I think that if you're feeling a sense of stagnation, I think it might
Julie
help
Chris
give
Stewart
you another sense, another way to approach solving that to some degree.
Chris
Yeah, and it's not to criticise them from being, you know,
Stewart
as I said
Chris
earlier, you do go, why is this so difficult? When you get involved in these businesses, you understand that, you know, for all sorts of reasons, you know, politics
Julie
being
Chris
one of them, that things are just the way they are because they are. And either we accept that and start planning or start making some decisions around how we can improve things without going through this kind of linear progressive process, which is unrealistic, right?
Julie
Yeah.
Speaker 4
I think the other, and I can't remember if you talk about it specifically in here, but the other thing in terms of who this is of interest to, it's not, you know, very rarely is the work that we're involved in a start from scratch exercise. It's a, you know, even if you're ticking along, doing all right, there's just, there's an opportunity. Most of the work we're doing is around sort of, refining and fine-tuning and then elevating the standard of comms and things like that so it's not it's not a throw the baby out with the bathwater and tear everything up we're generally working with something that's already there to try and
Chris
move on yeah yeah and and in isolation all of these things we've probably done a podcast on each of them you know from you know integrating acquisitions and complex product portfolios or this
Speaker 4
positioning
Chris
yeah issues about purpose all of all of the the greatest hits i
Speaker 4
think the other interest i don't know maybe this isn't one for today's podcast specifically but just because it's quite front of mind we're talking about it a lot at the moment something we're doing more and more around or have done in the last couple of years is the product positioning piece which is obviously very much
Julie
tethered to the
Speaker 4
brand thing but and driven and cut and comes from this you know is based on on the same principles but that kind of positioning around moving on from features and benefits and under under unpacking the value and what problem it's you're solving and making money saving money etc it's just it's becoming I think it's becoming more and more important in the
Julie
work that
Speaker 4
we're doing particularly in this space where again engineering led, technology led conversations tend to bleed into marketing comms rather than...
Stewart
Yeah I think it's all about that and I'd like the way that you set that out, somebody that does a lot of it in the document just outlining the positioning the why, the process around it and as Julie says we're doing a lot more of it because I think in the last few years businesses have had to learn how to sell harder than they've ever done before you know the buying journeys are more complicated their competition is getting smarter brighter and everything else you've kind of got to there so i think that's definitely a thing that i think the way you lead that out well yeah and it's about i
Chris
suppose it's about allying the the key and the the value message that the the brand or the product delivers to the customer with the kind of you know the brand foundations and the two things are slightly different strands but they they regress if you like back to the same place Yeah, and I think positioning is a product positioning, not positioning in a marketplace, but product positioning and being able to articulate value is really closely allied to the work that we do. So I think it's good that we're doing more of
Stewart
that stuff. Yeah, it's good.
Chris
It's more end to end.
Stewart
Yeah. So Chris, you sold me. I want it. Where did I get it?
Chris
Well, there's a link in the podcast, and it's also on the website. I fired a wee
Stewart
thing in the show notes, ladies and gentlemen, for a direct download. You don't need to wait. Just don't be a podcast. Got the show notes in there.
Chris
In fact, do not wait. Do not wait.
Stewart
Run.
Chris
Yeah, I mean, yeah. Listen, we're giving it a huge build-up. It's a document. I think it's good. It's a document. I think
Stewart
it's good. And also, as you know, the podcast, I don't like talking about things that we do, but I think this breaks. I think this is the first time we've done
Chris
it. It's the first time we've done it. Yeah,
Julie
it's the first time we've consolidated.
Speaker 4
I was going to say, a consolidation of a lot of these things that we've spoken about and touched on and written about in isolation, just bringing that under one
Julie
umbrella
Speaker 4
to kind of, and then presenting as sort of that. I just, and it's what, eight pages. It's a
Julie
nice, easy reading. It's 15
Chris
pages. Oh, is it? Yeah.
Speaker 4
Maybe eight, 12 page spreads. But it felt like eight. That's how good it
Stewart
was. It felt like eight
Chris
pages.
Stewart
That's how concise it was.
Chris
So yeah, and we might do more. It depends. I think it's just useful to, as I say, pull all that information so that we can showcase the fact that we know we've done this before and we know what we're doing. Yeah,
Julie
and I think there's
Stewart
good practical, it's not just theories, there's some nice advice in there as well about what to do,
Chris
even if
Julie
you
Chris
don't
Stewart
want to phone us. You know, you can just read it. Just read it. You might learn something. Ah,
Chris
you might
Stewart
not, but you probably will. You probably will. Undoubtedly. Yeah. All right. Grant.
Julie
Thank you all. Bye,
Chris
bye, bye,
bye.