B2B Marketing Is Ineffective and Boring If You Ignore the Emotion in Your Brand’s Culture

We all know that consumer brands sell on emotion. A drumming gorilla sold us Cadbury joy Coke asks us to ‘choose happiness’. Carling celebrates the power of belonging. What is a B2B brand’s emotional benefit? Other than the relief of not getting fired because you’re buying IBM, too many B2B brands see themselves as too sensible to offer anything so touchy feely. This is a huge blind spot for B2B brands, particularly service brands for whom relationships are key.

Lawyers, Architects, IT Consultants, etc all promise the same generic services, core strengths and great track record as their nearest and dearest competitors. So why should clients prefer one over the other? Well, as the saying goes, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Culture or ‘how we do things round here’ is ultimately what differentiates a business relationship. It’s your special sauce. It’s what clients pick upon in chemistry meetings. It’s why some relationships work and some fail. And therein lies the source of an ‘emotional benefit’ that clients buy.

The problem is that culture is hard to pin down at the best of times and people are easily sceptical when you talk about such intangibles. When brands ‘talk culture’, they fall back on platitudes. Who doesn’t claim to have a ‘proactive, problem-solving culture’? Who doesn’t espouse corporate values like ‘integrity’ and ‘customer-centricity’. This sounds like clichés to clients and doesn’t give practical guidance for staff on what they should actually do. Given we’re talking about your ‘special sauce’, brands need to do better.

Five abstract corporate values do not paint a picture of what working with or for an organisation feels like. The key to conveying culture is storytelling. Culture only lands when it’s a simple story of ’how we do things round here’. 2050’s culture-first branding methodology distils and articulates culture into a story that is clearly rooted in a cultural truth, shows how it delivers your brand promise, is distinctive and is told with a conviction that comes, as culture does, from the heart.

As an example, we worked with Daemon, a tech Consultancy... Stakeholder interviews identified Daemon’s cultural truth lay in how they brought teams together to work as an energising ‘movement’. We defined their brand promise as ‘to start a movement to deliver your digital transformation’. And we decoded their DNA into three core cultural behaviours which give practical guidance on how they deliver this promise: (1) Unite behind one vision (2) Empower people to realise potential (3) Inspire collective spirit. This is how Daemon ‘did things round here’. These behaviours paint a picture of what it would be like to work with and for Daemon. But a culture story is only truly compelling when told with conviction, so we developed an inspiring identity to make people feel the energising power of movements by drawing on the visual language of sportswear brands like Nike; to stand out and make Daemon ‘feel’ aspirational to staff, clients and talent.

B2B brands are not the rational corporate entities they can present themselves to be. They are filled with passionate people who are striving to deliver for their clients. And it is in the intangible cultural quality of how these people ‘do things round here’ that a B2B brands ‘emotional benefit’ lies namely in delivering a special relationship that works for you.