Brand Legitimacy in B2B Marketing

Brand legitimacy in B2B marketing is about ensuring the market perceives that your organization delivers on its promise. In other words, that the brand is actually living up to it's commitment and expectations. This commitment being the delivery of the core offering (products or services) as intended, without negative surprises. Legitimacy comes from the commitment neither to be overzealous nor unrealistic. A level of trust established that does not leave a spurious or false impression of your deliverables. Don't overpromise, or step outside the boundary of your capabilities. Brand legitimacy is confirmed when a prospect decides that even if they had not known of your brand previously, that your organization is fair, competent, and will deliver without disappointment. No customer wants to pay too much, be let down, or uncover negative surprises like unreasonable additional fees.

To some it is obvious. Yet, why is this important to the CMO? Isn't it the CEO's job to ensure you have a substantive offering that genuinely helps your clients? Naturally, the answer is 'Yes' to both. In short, the importance of legitimacy is that it dictates whether your brand will be taken seriously by your customers, or be considered a nasty joke. Brand legitimacy determines whether your company takes on the reputation of low quality, failed delivery, incapable deployment, or worse an outright SCAM. Ultimately, the balancing act is to know your offering intimately. Understand both the good and bad. Then set your marketing to highlight where you are exceptional, while NOT overselling your audience.

Never-Ending Pitches

Every CMO and VP of Marketing will tell you, as will I, that there is a never-ending flow of pitches from eager sales teams trying to sell their offering to you. Having been in charge of such teams for years, I fully understand both ends. Every company sells, and needs to reach its industry's decision makers. And, we understand the reality that B2B companies' marketing teams need to keep the lead generation engines pumping. Hence the continual pitches. But, there are good ways and bad ways to handle them, which impacts the perception of your brand and company.

What follows is an example of a lack of brand legitimacy in the B2B marketing case. By now every marketing leader has receive one or maybe several hundred emails from the XXXX Review (name hidden to protect the guilty). It drones on how your company won a very prestigious award, or was selected as 'the top 50 companies for the year'. It is impressive that these still burrow their way through spam filters. Often they are copied to the CEO with a promise of their photo on the front cover with an article discussing how "the CEO is driving the company ...". A good yet nasty psychological measure to apply subtle pressure to consider the offer. Best of all is the promise of the "three million decision makers" which the publication will reach from your target audience. All this for the low 'registration fee of $2,500US' (although the full cost balloons north of $15,000US for reprints, CEO on cover of their magazine, and so on).

Of course this is a SCAM! Red flags, or the hairs on the back of your neck raise immediately, as you think about this. The offer is too easy, and far too good to be true. Legitimacy of both the offer and the company producing it come into question immediately. Were it was such a prestigious and legitimate award, how and why would you have 'won' them monthly! Naturally, as a B2B buyer, such regularity in this 'amazing' offer erodes credibility, and the legitimacy of your company. The importance of this case isn't to highlight that this is a scam - which it is. Rather, the importance is to learn from it - and reflect on your own practices to ensure you are in no way doing the same to your customers.

If a retailer were to discount an item by $50 month after month, customers will quickly revalue its worth at $50, rather than the list price of $100. So too with your B2B brand value, and the legitimacy of your offering.

Is your Brand Legit?

Certainly, the above example is of a scam organization. It is easy to spot, yet more than one of my CEO's have taken them seriously.

They may deliver the service, but their offering is nowhere near the value their marketing promises. If you are an effective marketer, you would immediately realize that the claims are just too 'far out there' to be serious.

Agreed. No brand legitimacy to be found here. But what about the rest of us? Are we pitching too good an offer to high level decision makers. We are trying to get through to that right buyer persona, and potential customer. We want to get considered. So we pitch, to convince based on cutting costs, improving productivity, driving efficiency, and multiplying the impact of their teams. Just keep it real, and always back up your claims with real client cases. This is where the balancing act comes in.

Note to Start-ups and Scale-ups

In a recent webinar, Gary Survis, Operating Partner at Insight Partners (venture capital and private equity), recounted what a CIO mentioned to him. Many B2B companies trying to steer the CIO's purchase decision highlight astounding efficiency improvements and cost savings. The CIO tabulated that if he took all these pitches together and bought into all these efficiency improvements, he should be able to run his large organization with zero staff! Save for outsourcing the entire function (which the company chose not to do), this was simply an absurd extremity to the pitches he received.

The CIOs pointed advice to start-ups and scale-ups, is "don't over-promise." Keep your cases real. When the offering or improvement seems too good on paper (powerpoint), it simply loses credibility. Then your entire brand legitimacy comes into question. Will this company deliver? Can the offering provide even half the value they state? Will the ROI be anywhere close to their proposal? Or, will I look naive to present this to my boss for consideration?

Interestingly, this is not unlike the debate about brand versus intrinsic value of the offering. Without diverging on that tangent, read more in Brand vs Intrinsic Value in Marketing.

Again, it's well worth repeating. Offer case studies and reference real customer examples, where-ever possible. Most importantly, make sure your brand pitch communicates grounded, realistic solutions with reasonable expected results. This is how you build trust.

Building Credibility

Although Survis' advice was aimed at start-up and scale-up companies, it is broadly generalizable. Whether it is through your search engine optimization, landing pages, events, content marketing, or other brand building exercises - communicate grounded messages that build your credibility. Building trust in your industry is key to establishing your brand's legitimacy. It is key to build a reputation about your brand as having an offer that actually delivers on its marketing promise.

Capturing buyer attention is not a right. It is something your company must earn. You don't buy it ... you earn it. And you earn it by building brand credibility that establishes your company's brand legitimacy.