DaveStevensNow

Blogging about Profitable B2B Marketing | Branding | Digital | Team-Building

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Dave is an experienced global B2B Chief Marketing Officer / Marketing Director with an established reputation for delivering commercial results in start-up, mid-tier, and blue-chip businesses across technology, and business services and professional services sectors. Dave has worked for major brands such as Telefonica O2, EY, and Barclays and held posts from Chief Marketing Officer to Director of Online, has run his own business, and managed a P&L for a major corporate. He is chair and co-founder of the Business Marketing Club (www.businessmarketingclub.org.uk) – a network of B2B marketers. In 2019, he was named one of the top 100 B2B European marketing leaders (https://www.hottopics.ht/34199/top-100-b2b-european-marketing-leaders-2019/). He is a graduate of Cambridge University, a Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Chartered Marketer and holds a MBA with Imperial College, London. Dave is a keen cyclist and adventure traveller, is married, and lives in Buckinghamshire. You can read his blogs at www.DaveStevensNow.com.

  • Marketing Week announce their Brands of the Year and not one is B2B…


    With much ado, Marketing Week have announced their nominations for 2019 Brand of the Year. There are some brilliant and well-deserved nominations in here: Greggs, Monzo, Nationwide, and Netflix among them. These businesses deserve much credit for responding to new market demand (Greggs and veganism), taking a stand against unacceptable behaviour (Nationwide and online abuse), and disrupting traditional markets (Monzo and banking, Netflix and television) and I’m chuffed to see them on the list.

    But I’m mostly struck by the fact that not one of their ten nominations for 2019 Brand of the Year are for brands occupying the B2B marketing space. Not one.

    How could this be? Perhaps B2B just isn’t as important as B2C. But that is rot. Just look to the report launched this week on the contribution of B2B to the UK economy. This showed that 80% of all UK firms derive at least some of their income from B2B and that 44% of UK turnover comes from B2B activity.

    Perhaps brand is not important in the B2B space? But that is patently untrue. In every job I’ve ever had in B2B, brand has been a key contributor to helping a business to change its story, differentiate itself better, and ultimately get customers to pay for its products and services.

    Perhaps the achievements of the best B2B brands just aren’t up there with the B2C stars? That’s just nonsense. You want B2B disruptors? Think SnapCap, Skype, Storey… You want B2B cause marketing? Think IBM and “Girls Who Code”… You want B2B new market demand? Think Instagram…

    I can’t help thinking that the Brand of the Year list is just another example of B2B marketing blindness by the wider marketing profession. The marketing industry can do more than market FMCG, but that seems to be forgotten. And that’s a shame because B2B marketing is actually more difficult than B2C and B2B marketing professionals need more support and respect from their industry than many of their well-funded and better-privileged B2C colleagues.

  • Minor Figures kicks up a Major Storm


    There’s a fascinating marketing discussion that has kicked off on LinkedIn over the last few days concerning a tube advert for Minor Figures that can be seen right now at Holborn Station.

    Minor Figures is a rather nice brand of organic cold brew coffee. It comes in cans and each can has a quirky illustration on it conveying relaxation or energy or drive dependent on the type of drink inside. One of these illustrations – a freewheeling skateboarder – features in the Holborn ad, alongside the mark “Minor Figures Coffee”.

    The ad has aggravated some commentators for its lack of a call to action. There’s no website, no social media handle, no postal address. Others are aggravated by the subtlety. Where are the people drinking the coffee? Still others are upset by the subtlety in the mark. Surely it needs a more distinctive typeface? Surely it needs an illustration in the mark? What about a distinctive colour?

    The counter-view? Maybe it’s not about purchase but brand building? Maybe its target audience are attracted by an anti-advertising approach? Maybe we’ve reached peak Google and we don’t need clear calls to action any more?

    Perhaps. But to me this debate shows the danger of detaching creative from objectives. We don’t know what the Minor Figures marketing team who placed the ad were seeking to do. Only in circumstances where we understand the context for a campaign can we really comment on its effectiveness. What is a creative seeking to do with which audience?

    It reminds me of my reaction to a report that crossed my desk last week from Libras and Contently called “Engaging your audience with visual content”. This report gauges the use of photography, infographics, and video by marketers, their preferred channels, and the resulting engagement. Yet surely it’s the context that matters? You can’t assess the best content or channel to market in isolation from the objective. There is no universal right. Marketing is far more sophisticated and interesting than that.

  • Mixed News Monday


    Two very different reports on the state of B2B marketing hit my desk this morning.

    The first is a new report from B2B Marketing on the contribution of the B2B industry to the UK economy based on a survey of 809 senior UK managers. The headline is that 80% of all UK firms derive at least some of their income from B2B. And 44% of UK turnover comes from B2B activity. The report then goes onto break the activity down by sector and by region, which is worth a look. But the big news is that B2B is a big part of the British economy and not to be overlooked.

    Compare this with the second report of the day. This one is from McKinsey and is entitled “Unleashing the CMO in B2B insurance”. The headline here is that “unlike their B2C counterparts, many B2B insurers do not consider marketing a vital function…”. The report goes on to articulate some key steps that CMOs can take to address this. The advice is sound: stakeholder management, de-siloing, tying marketing to the bottom line.

    B2B marketers have a big role to play in maintaining and growing the value of B2B in Britain. We’ve come a long way but there’s a lot still to do.

  • Some great models to help you with your marketing plan


    I’ve been talking about how to develop a good B2B marketing plan in my last few posts. There are plenty of good business and marketing models to use to help you with your plan.

    Michael Porter’s 5 Forces Model is my favourite for use in your marketing audit of the micro-environment. Invariably there will be one force that you’ve never really considered properly before and it’s great to allow you to get a sense of the market that your business is in as a whole.

    I like Drucker’s Product Portfolio Model when I’m looking at the different products or services that a business has in its armoury – particularly helpful when a business has too many propositions and is looking to try to focus in and prioritise. The BCG Matrix is an interesting alternative model for use here.

    When looking at individual products or services, Ranchhod’s Product Lifecycle Model is really helpful – particularly if you want to ensure your product remains true to your brand through the supply chain. Levitt’s Product Levels Model is another good way of breaking this one down.

    And I think Ranchhod comes up trumps again when looking at how to measure marketing with his Maximising of Resources Model to ensure you’re measuring the right thing.

    All of these are wth having to hand in your B2B marketing tool-kit. What marketing models do you use?

  • Things to think about in a Marketing Audit


    As I noted in my last post, it is not uncommon for the marketing audit in a plan to be used as a dumping ground for a whole series of unrelated points and loose threads. It shouldn’t be. It should be a space where marketers look analytically at their environment and prioritise what to focus their plan as a response to.

    To try to keep things simple I frequently ask marketers to pick the ten most important areas from the list below as they affect the product or service that they are writing about. Always consider why an area has importance enough to be flagged in a plan. Here’s the list…

     Major demographic developments and trends 

     Changes in laws and regulations 

     Changes in customer lifestyles and values 

     Customer attitudes to the businesses involved in the supply chain of the product or service

     Changes in market size, growth, geographical distribution, and profits of customer

     Major customer segments 

     Customer needs and buying processes 

     Reputation of Company branding the product or service and its competitors in the eyes of customers 

     Decision making process of customers 

     Major competitors, their strengths, and weaknesses, and marketing approaches 

     Main channels to market 

     Internal stakeholder team objectives and strategy 

     Your budget 

     Your timeframe for marketing 

     Product strengths and how these change over the period of the plan 

     Product weaknesses and how these change over the period of the plan

  • Here’s a radical idea… a marketing plan!


    Ask three B2B marketers for a marketing plan and you’ll get three different documents doing three different things. You will want to debate what the plan suggests but instead you frequently find yourself debating what the plan looks like.

    So as to help things along, here’s my view of just what should be included in a decent marketing plan…A

    (1) Executive Summary 

    What are the (up to) five key things that your marketing plan says you will do?

    This is your elevator pitch to the business and will be at marketing objective or marketing strategy level. Write this at the end.

    (2) Background 

    Your marketing audit. 

    These are the things you need to take note of when writing your plan. Anything going here should be factual – ie it will have a quotable source. The temptation is to use this section as a dumping ground – only note things that will impact the way that you market the product or service. It is likely that you will be writing about a customer – which means you should be clear who that customer is: decision maker, product expert, prospect, etc. If you don’t know the answers, ask yourself if it’s important; how can you find out; is it a risk if you cannot?

    (3) Objectives 

    Your marketing objectives.

    No more than five things you will do to use marketing to deliver the Product or Business management objectives, taking advantage of or overcoming the points you noted in section 2, in the time and with the budget you have available. 

    Each objective will be clear so you know exactly what needs to be achieved, its completion will be measurable so you can tell when it has been achieved. It will be possible to achieve it in the timeframe and with the budget you have. It will have a clear timeframe to be delivered in.

    At this point, your objectives will be strategic – ie they will be about what you will do not how you will do it (websites, brochureware, events, etc come later!!).

    (4) Strategy 

    The segmentation, targeting, and positioning you will use.

    To achieve your marketing objectives, who will you target and how will you position our offering to them?

    What’s the best way of looking at your audience (location, ACORN, age, gender, occupation, socio-economic group, job title, benefits sought, etc)?

    What is the position you will market to this target audience that gives you clarity, uniqueness, and advantage?

    (5) Messages 

    Up to five key messages in order of importance.

    These are the points you want to get across to your target audience – as close to the actual words you will use as possible. They would be the points you’ll use in all of your marketing.

    (6) Tactics 

    The things you will practically do (written as an objective), how much money you will spend, and when you will deliver it

    Group these by channel: advertising, signage, hoarding, digital, events, guerrilla, incentive schemes, personal selling, PR, and sponsorship. Bullet each point.

    (7) KPIs 

    How will you measure your success in delivering your tactics?

    What are your targets for each tactic? How will these help you deliver your marketing objectives?

    (8) Implementation Plan 

    A GANTT chart or equivalent for who needs to do what by when

  • Look how far we’ve come, Baby!


    Marketing is a young profession and it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how it has changed.

    It originated in the 1960s as a response to the “product management” drive, which focused on the quality of a product assuming that if the product was of a high enough standard it would be bought and to the “selling” drive, which focused on shifting products without looking at consumer needs.

    “Customer marketing” originally focused on a B2C audience and involves researching customer needs and wants, and then developing the product, its price, its promotion, and its distribution to suit those needs better.   As you might expect for a new discipline, “marketing’ had no real centre of focus in the early days.  Company organization charts of the time show the profession as reporting into different product lines rather than existing as a function in its own right.

    By the 1980s, customer marketing began to be expanded to cover a B2B audience as well as a B2C one.

    At about the same time, branding techniques began to develop as a means of distinguishing one seller’s product from those of others.

    Broadly by the 1990s, the discipline had evolved to be the champion of a holistic customer experience focusing on every point at which customers experience an organisation through the life of their relationship rather than on a product by product interaction.  For example, the mobile phone company O2 would look across all of its customer interactions when defining its customers’ experience too – whether at the shop where they buy the phone, or at the customer service centre they call to enquire, or at the bill they receive through the post.

    The growth of websites and mobile devices at the same time encouraged this focus further because it has empowered the customer base.  Customer comments on websites and social media can quickly be publicised and so control of information has become more difficult.

    These were the years of marketing’s growth as a standalone functional department – existing in its own right apart from HR, Finance, and Manufacturing.  I was starting my career in BT in the mid-Nineties and joined its standalone marketing group.

    By the Noughties, marketing began to grow up.  The concept of integrated or holistic marketinghad developed.  This takes the view that you cannot successfully market something by solely focusing on product, price, promotion, and distribution.  Rather, you need to have the whole business on message for marketing to work effectively.  So, marketing teams began to guide each part of the business while being coordinated centrally.   So at PA Consulting Group, my marketing and communications group had a corporate centre, but with marketing teams sitting in each sector, service, and country of operation.

    So Marketing has changed rapidly in just fifty years.  Our work as marketers is defined by that change and change is part of the job and what makes our roles so exciting.

    So next time you’re wrestling with a stakeholder who doesn’t get marketing or you’re finding change difficult to take effect, just stop, take a deep breath, and consider how much has changed in the marketing space in such a short time. Our profession is a brilliant, transforming roller-coaster ride and it’s great to be aboard!D

  • Measurement in Public and Media Relations


    I attended a PR Moment event on how to understand the metrics and insights for your C-suite last night.

    There still seems to be a lot of angst among public and media relations experts around what metrics and insights work. It’s always worth keeping an eye on this subject buy I think the angst is now misplaced. This year, I’m judging PR work for the Association of Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and for the last couple of years I’ve been a judge for PR Moment and in my view we’re getting better at the whole metrics and insight deal. The entries I’ve seen have represented client feedback, linked back to business objectives, looked to the future impact of PR initiatives, included bench-marking, prioritised practical action over theoretical navel-contemplation, included testing and live optimisation, and prioritised insightful outcomes.

    There’s a difference between managing a PR operation and reporting on it. The C-suite will be interested in your contribution to delivering objectives, but also in what customers or stakeholders make of PR, the company, the product, the market, and the issues that matter to them. This latter point is even more important in times of uncertainty – like now.

    You should measure the meaningful impact that your campaign is having. Consider outcomes not outputs and focus away from costs which simply reinforce an impression that PR is a cost centre.

    Don’t be afraid of some qualitative metrics. The best approach to the C-suite will be a mix of both showing that you are on top of your operation while also offering insight and intelligence that can guide the top echelons of an organisation. Active listening is great.

    Finally don’t go too far with the algebra. Tenuous means of calculating a contribution to the bottom line will fail. If you’ve got to explain your working and assumption to get to a number, that number won’t be believed. Beware those abstract definitions!

  • How Customer Oriented are You?


    One of the key challenges that any B2B marketer has is to ensure that the customer is considered and put at the heart of a business’s plans.

    Marketers try to think of the customer first – “outside-in” and using the customer’s words.  That means aligning a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its most valuable customers in order to maximise the customer’s long-term financial value to the business.

    Customer orientation increases business.  People buy from people they trust.  A report for E-Consultancy shows that 90% of organisations that increase investment in customer focus  noted that it increased their business’s profitability.  At the end of the day, customers decide whether or not they want the business’s products and they pay the bills.  And it’s brand-supporting.  Businesses which have more knowledge about their end users are safer, more profitable, and distinguished.

    Businesses may be prone to seeing customer focus as an alternative to business self-interest.  In my view that is incorrect.  We need to balance customer and business interests.  Customer focus is not about just being nice, a high-level philosophy, treating all customers as equal, treating all customers as right, or ignoring the needs of employees, partners, or regulators.

    You need to choose which customers and functions to focus upon.  There are lots of different types of customer.  Decision makers, senior contacts, day-to-day contacts, users, and so on.  You need to prioritise.  That means customer focus can reduce costs as if we can be predictive, responsive, and adaptive then we can know what our customers want to do and we can actively manage them across our portfolio.

    How do you apply customer orientation to your work?  Make it part of your objectives and values, discussed at your team meetings each month, data weighted equally with financial data.  Identify your target customers and organise your team into market segments with responsibility for specific customers.  Use customer focus to drive your innovation.

    Research, research, research!  Constantly collect customer information, put a formal customer management measurement programme in place, build a profile of your customers, map your customer journey around big tasks.

    Train your team so that they understand how their job provides added value to the customer.  Talk about the customer at all levels of the business.  Spend time with customers.

    Who does customer orientation well?  Amazon places an empty chair in its board meetings to represent the customer and ensure customer focus at the highest level.  Employees at O2 and Zappos all work in one customer-facing role each year.  BA Gold Card customers get an improved customer experience by being diverted straight through to the airport lounge an away from the security and shopping misery.  Meanwhile the experience of the standard BA customer gets worse, now having to even pay for food and drink during their flight.

    How customer oriented is your business?D

  • PR is as Measurable as any other form of Marketing


    I’ve been looking at a number of PR campaigns recently as a judge for the AMEC Awards and I’m pleased to say I’ve seen a brilliant step change in the way that our profession is now measuring the effectiveness of our PR.

    Any PR activity will have one of six possible goals:  presentation, attention, comprehension, acceptance, retention, and action. And businesses have been traditionally very poor at measuring any of them.

    Presentation where PR simply is about getting a message to a target should be an easy win.  I want to know the precise demographic who reads a journal.  I want to know exactly how many people have picked up a copy of the journal on the day my article is featured.  That information has to be achievable and all PR professionals should be seeking to provide it.

    Attention will become easier to gauge as we rely more on digital.  There’s a great electronic publishing tool called Turtl that we rolled out to replace all of British Land’s hard copy brochureware.  I’ve always had a problem with that printed brochureware, which is that aside from its expense, it is difficult to know if anyone reads them.  Well Turtl can tell me not just who opens the e-brochure, but which pages they visited, and how much time they spent on each page and whether the reader stays at the surf level or immerses.  This is the future of publishing and PR can embrace it.  And for anything that you do digitally, you can embrace it right here right now.  Websites. Mobile.  Blogging.  Social media.

    Time on page and immersion data allows me to edge into the previously measurable only through research worlds of comprehension, acceptance, and retention.

    Action where PR has persuaded the target audience to act in a particular way should be the easiest win of all.  At British Land, I might push for an article in the Evening Standard’s property supplement on one of our new properties to carry a unique call to action allowing easy measurement.  

    It’s great to see that we’ve started researching the impact of different PR treatments with our target audiences.  How does our target focus group respond to different forms of words in different sources at different times?  For example if we know that a customer reading a story on page four of the Metro from Liverpool Street Station in November responds less positively than reading the same story from the same place in July, we can adjust our future PR as a result.  If you’re investing heavily in PR, you owe it to yourself to invest heavily in the measurement of PR.  Every campaign that we run should be tested in this way.