Building B2B Brands That Drive Revenue

Too often, business leaders think of brand building as only a consumer marketing activity. This is just wrong.? Strong brands drive preference in B2B decisions and serve as a proxy for quality, innovation, and other components of credibility and trust that are so vital to business decision-making.? However, B2B marketers often question the connection between brand building activities and improved financial performance.

Recently, Kantar conducted the largest ever analysis of data connecting both brand perceptions and purchasing behaviors examining 5.4 BILLION attitudinal data points covering 21,000 brands in 540 categories and 54 markets.? This was combined with 1.1 BILLION purchase data points for 20,000 brands in 100 categories across 25 different markets and analyzed over 10 years of results.??

Here is what they found:

Brand Strength is directly tied to Stock Market performance, with stronger brands generating superior shareholder returns, recovering from economic downturns more quickly, and showing more resilience during bear markets.

Kantar used this same data-set to standardize an approach to building brands that improve a company’s financial performance. Although branding is too often treated as a murky alchemy, using this data-driven approach there is now a well documented process that companies can follow to build B2B brands that drive improved financial results for their companies.? The formula is deceptively simple:?

Businesses build brands that drive improved financial results by being meaningfully different to more people.?

Let’s unpack that.

What defines a Meaningful business?

To assess how meaningful a business is, we need only answer two questions.? How well does the business meet the needs for a particular category, and how much is the business loved, or hated by those that know it.? In simple terms, the strength of the benefits received and pain relieved your customers experience when working with your business defines how meaningful it is.?

What makes a business Different?

Difference is also very straightforward.? How unique is the business from it’s competitors, and does the business set trends in the category? Just as with Meaningful, Difference only matters for prospects / customers that know the business, which leads us to the final piece, Salience.

What is Salience?

Salience captures awareness, not only as a binary variable (aware vs NOT aware) but also the strength of this awareness. To capture this for a business, we only need to answer one question. For how many people, does this business come to mind quickly when they experience the need?? Typically this is a function of both physical availability (it’s physically available to me when and where I need it) and mental availability (it easily comes to mind when I experience the need).? If the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a feasible option because for example it’s only available in a different country, it’s not very salient.? Likewise, if it’s easily available, but never comes to mind, it’s not very salient either.

Bringing it all together

So by understanding what makes our business meaningful, and how it is different, and telling that story to our marketplace, we will grow a brand that delivers outsized financial results for our business.? The ability for a brand to impact a financial decision is often defined as Demand Power.?

How do we create B2B brands that are Meaningfully Different to more people?

How to build Meaningfulness

To do this, marketers start by understanding their target market and niche.? Who they are from a firmagaphic standpoint as well as the business context they operate in and potential pain points that might be triggering them to take action.? All this fuels an Ideal Customer Profile.??

Likewise, we build Personas to capture the different members of the buying committee, what they care about, how they like to make decisions, their personal and professional wins.? By understanding our target market we’re able to understand what is meaningful to them.? Does Brand Purpose matter this audience?? If so, your company’s brand ideals should be on-display and well aligned (see section below).? You must focus on the benefits the customer cares about to build meaningfulness.? Getting out of the building and talking to customers, conducting interviews and generating feedback are good ways to know how meaningful you are to the marketplace and ways to strengthen your meaningfulness.?

How to build Difference

Additionally, we must build difference.? To do this we need to understand the competitive landscape and identify those things the customer cares about, and which ones are table-stakes for market parity and which ones are unique and differentiated for our business.? Likewise, does your company follow the leader and only build capabilities to keep up with the market, or are they setting the trends that define the best solutions for the category??

When the functional and/or experiential attributes of two products are hard to distinguish for amplifying meaning, differentiation becomes especially important.? This is where the culture of a business and the personality of their brand (see below) help to set them apart.? If a company doesn’t know what their personality is, it’s unlikely to come across in any valuable way, making it impossible to create meaningfulness or differentiation. Formalized Positioning Strategies capture these aspects of meaningfulness and differentiation, and communicate it in a memorable way, the first step to Salience.

How to build Salience

Now that we know what will deliver brand preference, we must make it salient to our audience.? The easy but expensive way is to buy lots of ads.? Tell the marketplace over-and-over how we are meaningful to them and how we are different than competitors.? Research indicates that repetition works, and powerful ads can have a strong impact.? The better way however is build these perceptions through consistency.? Not only consistency in your advertising messaging, but consistency in every customer interaction.??

From the feel of the logo and color palette, to the office layout, and how your employees dress and behave in meetings.? When all of these tiny cues build a consistent story of how you are meaningful to your customers and different than your competitors, you build salience in the mind of the customer or prospect.??

Additionally, this consistency builds Trustworthyness, a key emotional element all B2B brands must convey.? Armed with a robust Customer Journey Map, you can identify all the myriad ways you can engage with your customers on their Journey to purchase.? Engaging with your customers at each stage, and educating them on why you are Meaningful, and how you’re Different is a key way to build this Salience without just dumping money into advertising.

Creating this for your business

It’s impossible for your company to tell a consistent story of how you are meaningfully different, if you don’t know what that story is.? Start with understanding your target and what is meaningful to them.? Then understand the marketplace, how you are different than your competitors, and how you lead the category with innovations. Document these insights and use them to shape the emotional aspects of your brand personality, then imbue everything you say and do and every potential customer interaction.? Specifically your Revenue Systems.

Building your brand personality

There’s a lot of research that demonstrates people assign personalities to businesses and brands (whether the business wants them to or not) so the most successful businesses purposefully build a personality that will improve Salience in the mind of their customer and cement how that business is meaningfully different.? Dr. Jennifer Aaker, a behavioral scientist and marketing professor, developed a brand personality framework in 1997 that many brand strategists trust in crafting a brand personality.?

This is framework is frequently structured in two parts.??

The first part is Trustworthyness.? You wouldn’t want to do business with someone with an un-trustworthy personality, likewise you wouldn’t do business with a company with an un-trustworthy personality.? Trustworthiness is separated into two equally important parts. Sincerity, which captures your intent to do good things, and Competence, your ability to actually do what you say you intend to do.? For example, if you knew a bank didn’t intend to protect your money, you’d never trust them. Likewise, even if they intended to keep your money safe, but were incompetent, you wouldn’t trust them either.?

Both Sincerity and Competence are important for Trust.

The second part is what makes your personality Interesting. There are three typical ways brands accomplish this.? You can stimulate Excitement.? You can convey Ruggedness.? You can embody Sophistication.? Just like most people, most brands are a blend of these different elements, but may emphasize one aspect more.? American Express is known for it’s sophistication, where Visa tends to lean into positioning that emphasizes Excitement. A brand must be interesting to have a personality worth engaging with, but it can be interesting in lots of different ways.? However, it’s important to remember, no matter how interesting a brand is, if it’s not Trustworthy, it’s a flawed personality that will not create meaningful difference or make a positive impact on your business financials.

You’ve likely heard of character archetypes.? These are based in common characters in mythology and storytelling.? Humans have come to expect personalities to align to these stereotypes and these can be helpful frameworks for fleshing out a robust brand personality.? Pro Tip:? Many brands want to be the “Hero” archetype to save the day for their customer, but chances are, you’ll be better off as the sidekick that makes your customer the Hero in their own story.? Sidekick archetypes include the “Caregiver” (e.g. Samwise Gamgee to Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings) or the “Sage” (Obi Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars )

Where do Brand Ideals / Purpose fit in?

In Jim Stengel’s excellent book “Grow” he recounts dozens of examples and cites significant quantitative research on how when businesses embody a purpose beyond making money with real ideals, they experience much better financial performance.? This makes perfect sense when we understand that what a business stands for helps to make it meaningful to it’s customers, and when a business is the only one in the category that shares ideals with the customers, it create difference.? When companies clearly communicate these ideals and purpose and it resonates to their market, it delivers salience, and drives growth.? It’s less easy to pick a brand ideal and call it your own like you can with a brand personality.? Typically, companies are either already very knowledgeable about what their ideals are, because it’s central to their identity, or they work hard to uncover the deeper motivations in the company.? Brand purpose is most easily defined as the company’s reason to exist beyond making money, and tends to be grounded in fundamental human experiences, like enabling connection, or inspiring exploration.?

Although corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or diversity, equity and inclusion programs can help demonstrate that your brand has ideals, these are not brand ideals in themselves.

Integrating into your business

When you know what matters to your audience, and how that aligns with your brand and can effectively communicate how your business is different from your competitors, you have the building blocks of an effective B2B brand strategy that will generate demand while creating awareness. Once you integrate this throughout the Customer’s Buying Journey you’ll have a Revenue Flywheel that Creates Trust and Interest in your brand.

Many of these concepts and templates are addressed in our book “Are Your Leads KILLING Your Business?” a #1 Best-Seller in 10+ Categories on Amazon.? Just comment below “free book” and I’ll send you a link for a free download!