Elements of a Tech Brand Story

Three Pillars and a Foundation

This is Part 2 of a blog series on B2B tech branding. Part 1 Building a Tech Brand for Business; Part 3 Creating an Authentic Brand Story; Part 4 Brand Stories & Hero's Journey; Part 5 Building a Business Brand with a Collective Soul: Google Cloud Interview

A brand story is how the tech company promises to help a customer create business value based on a unique insight (product magic) delivered through its offering and supported by a set of commitments to bring the story to life.

Therefore, each brand story can be seen as three pillars (promise, insight, offering) with the foundation of commitments made to the customer and the marketplace. 

Let’s dig into these components and look at some examples of each.

Pillar 1: A Promise of Value

The brand promise is a statement of business value phrased in customer language. Unlike in consumer marketing, where a different promise can be created and targeted for each consumer segment, a brand promise for a business needs to speak to multiple personas and stakeholders within a business account. So, to create a brand promise, we need to segment the business audience into the most common customer subtypes. 

Customer Subtypes

At the root of business marketing, there are two main customer subtypes: the user, who uses the product to get a job done, and the buyer, who cares about business value created by completion of the job through the use of product. 

For most business apps and services, the user is a business employee or sometimes the end consumer of the business customer. The buyer is a line-of-business [LOB] owner who cares about achieving a business outcome, usually supported by the relevant IT buying center. For example, a supply chain manager may buy planning software for her planners, with the IT application team doing the evaluation, purchasing, and deployment. 

This pattern is flipped for more foundational software like app development, data/AI, or infrastructure tools and platforms. The users are tech builders (e.g., developers, data engineers, and data scientists), and the buyers are IT owners, often supported by relevant business owners in building a business case. For instance, an app dev tool may be used by developers and purchased by an IT app dev group with the business case tied to new digital use cases.

Regardless, a credible brand promise needs to address both the user and buyer subtypes and build a connection between the two. 

Here is how to do so in B2B tech marketing.

Identify the Job Your Product Does...

A relevant framework for building a user-focused value proposition is the Jobs To Be Done [JTBD] framework by Clayton Christensen, which states that a user employs a product to do a “job”— the intention behind the user tasks. For instance, the jobs for a customer service agent are to identify and resolve a customer issue in a timely and satisfying manner. Therefore, an AI chat bot, call center software, and ticket routing algorithm. all are subservient to these jobs. This perspective shifts our view of the product from a bundle of features to the utility it offers to a user in a specific job context. 

Start with identifying who the user of your product is and what jobs are responsible are for getting done. Identify the landscape of all the jobs your product may be able to support. The functionality of your product has to either create gain or reduce pain for the user in facilitating the job. 

Therefore, from this job landscape, choose the most critical job for which the user may use your product. How is the job executed with your product usage? How does the product reduce friction in the job? How is the user delighted in doing the job with your product? Note that this user-based value proposition is tied to personal efficacy and productivity experienced by the user in executing the job for which the product is used. This is different from the downstream effect of that job in unleashing business value. 

...To Create Business Value You Can Promise

The buyer cares less about the jobs to be done and more about the impact of completed jobs on the business. The buyer’s different priority is the reason why a user-based value proposition is not enough to create a brand story. 

The most common framework to identify the buyer value proposition is value chain analysis. In this method, you map out the critical business function or process your buyer is part of and show how your product creates value for the customer's business. [Porter]. Anchor your product’s value on the specific business problem in the value chain the buyer is facing. For example, the buyer of an AI-assisted chatbot solution is looking to improve online sales by assisting shoppers with automated help. The buyer is part of the customer acquisition value chain and wants to improve business metrics of conversion and revenue.  

Once you have identified the major value chain and key metrics, map out the key value attributes in this domain that determine business value, cost, quality, or satisfaction. Then do a competitive analysis of the attribute landscape and choose a set of attributes your brand should own. These need not be unique to you, but these must be critical to the customer. More importantly, you must believe you can deliver on these better than others through your product. In our chat-bot example above, the attribute map may show “reliability” is category value owned by a competitor, but “accuracy” is an attribute that has not been strongly associated with anyone. 

Bridge the Jobs and Business Value

Now that you have value of the jobs user want done and the value business buyers care about, the two should be unified in a coherent value statement of this structure:

“The [user] calls upon our [product] to perform [job-to-be-done], which generates [business value] as part of [value chain] and as measured by [metric].”

Pillar 2: A Magical Insight

If you have identified a brand promise based on a business problem and your product gets the job done, then you are halfway there. You still need to build a case for why your company is better than others for the business customer. 

Today, many companies practice purpose-based marketing, where they stand for an aspirational purpose (why) based on the company mission. But the reality is that for tech companies, the why is always tied to the what of the technology. For instance, Google's mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” is not viable without its proprietary algorithms that organize online information.

A brand insight is a way to square this circle: connect the why of the company purpose with the how of the technology.

Coming up with such an insight is hard for most tech brands. Let’s look at how to create such an insight.

Discover the Magic Your Technology Unlocks...

Begin by identifying exactly your technical magic. In his work on the nature of technology, economist Brian Arthur asks the question What phenomenon does your technology harness in a new way to achieve a purpose? 

According to Arthur, there are broadly three areas of new “phenomena” that a technology harnesses, with some that are a blend of these:

1. Digital or computational, such as new software methods, algorithms, artifacts, and architectures. Examples include virtualization in cloud computing, deep learning methods in AI, and quantum computing.
2. Physical, such as new sensors, chips, devices, arrays, and materials that come from new ways to control physics or bio-chemical properties of nature. Examples include cameras, lithium batteries, and various nano-technologies.
3. Behavioral, based on human psychology at the individual, team, or societal level. Examples include most highly engaging applications from Instagram to Slack to Fortnite, which depend upon unlocking a personal or social behavior.

Therefore, identify the phenomenon your technology is harnessing in the product. If you are an AI company, is this a new algorithm or a model building tool or a model tuned for a certain domain use case? If you are a SaaS application, is it the user experience, the business workflow, or the configuration templates, or the data model? For infrastructure tools, is it a new architecture or a new open source framework? 

...For the Most Canonical Use Case

Then, consider the main purpose to which this phenomenon can be put to use in your market. Let’s call it the ideal or canonical use case. For an application, it may be the most critical workflow (e.g., digital signature approval for Docusign). For a new algorithm, it may be a domain-specific use case of ideal data sets in which it yields best results (e.g, medical imaging). For a new sensor, like LIDAR, it is the use case that makes best use of the sensor properties (e.g., object detection and mapping in automated driving). 

The product magic is how your tech solves the canonical use case. 

Can you articulate it in its simplest form? You don't need a laundry list of all features of your tech, nor do you need all the components that make the product possible. You just need the core phenomenon and the primary use case to which it can be applied.

An unusual combination of novel tech with a powerful use case is similar to Peter Thiel’s definition of “the secret” in his book Zero to One. He says, “Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world.”

On which insight are you betting the company? What is your insight that shall unlock millions of dollars of value in the market? For instance, for a digital product, how does your product uniquely address the customer problem? This secret could even be social or behavioral, such as an app designed from a social insight, like Calm for meditation or Noom for weight loss, or a product built around the developer community of an open source project. 

However you arrive at a brand insight, this much is clear: a technology company without an insight cannot build a tech brand. 

Pillar 3: A Compelling Offering

Once you have an insight into your technology’s product “magic,” you can now start adding a list of other capabilities around the product to reframe the technology capabilities for the user to get the job done and for the buyer to improve the business metrics.

Bundle Your Product into a Compelling Offering…

At this point, you should broaden the list of capabilities you deliver from product features to the “whole product,” also called the offering. An offering is more than just your product. Typically, this would include pricing, contractual terms, additional services, and extensible products from your surrounding network or marketplace.

For example, if one of your brand promises is to be the most trusted vendor, point out the product capabilities that deliver on this, create better support levels that engender trust, and make contractual terms transparent. Again, the goal is not to create a laundry list of all features, but to highlight the best few that make your offerings unique. Here, you may have to combine the capabilities that are universal to the product category and those that are truly unique to your product as identified in product “magic.” 

...That Redefines Your Category or a Niche within It

When purchasing software, IT departments and technology buyers are heavily influenced by analysts like Gartner and Forrester that define and track product categories and the vendors within them. This makes the buying process simpler and product evaluations easier for the IT buying centers. These product categories reflect the established definitions and buying norms for a similar set of technologies and often change slowly over years. 

For most tech companies, a brand story can help position them in the right product category. A compelling offering wrapped around a strong product with technical differentiation (“magic”) may give you an opportunity to carve out a distinctive niche within a product category. For example, HubSpot is now part of Gartner’s CRM Lead Management category. 

In some cases, especially if your product “magic” is truly novel, you may choose to not join an existing category of products and instead reframe your product in a new category. This is not without risk, since this would require investment in educating the early adopter buyers while foregoing any market demand that may come from analyst endorsements and comparisons. However, the payoff may be high if your brand story supports the creation of a new category—the definition and criteria for which are influenced by you. Slack appears to be pursuing such an approach, as the old IT category of unified communication was not a good one. Instead Slack is now seen as a work stream collaboration company. These are more than semantic issues since they directly affect buyer demand and market positioning in the short run. 

Foundation: Brand Commitments

All the work of defining a brand story is for naught if you don’t live the story every day. To live the story, you need to make your commitments public. You have to engage your customers, energize your employees, evangelise your developer community around your promise, and choose to deliver in hundreds of ways. For marketing purposes, you can translate a few of your commitments into iconic actions that others see as unique to you, for example, Salesforce giving away 1% of profits and Google for Good projects.

There are at least six categories where brand commitments count and iconic actions may be needed. Here are the categories and a few examples.

User Experience

If the brand promise of a SaaS product is to be intelligent, is the user onboarding experience intuitive and does it make use of prior user data? If a service promises to be responsive, how good is its site response? For SaaS companies, the user journey includes not just the web, mobile, and social interactions with the user but also the product interactions and experiences of onboarding, engagement, issue resolution, upgrades, and renewals. Choose a few iconic actions that delight or surprise the user and emphasise the promise. For example, Slack’s seamless user experience with integrated products is one of the reasons for user adoption.

Customer Relationships 

Relationship orientation and interaction modes vary a lot among B2B tech companies, ranging from self service among small business segments to direct sales for large enterprises. Even within a segment, one company may pride on responsiveness to customer issues while others may bet on deep engineering collaboration. Do your brand commitments to the customer show up in your customer relationships and interactions? If you promise to be the most technical experts, do your sales engineers reflect that? If you promise the fastest resolution of issues, do your support site channels (e.g., chat and contact us) reflect that? HubSpot’s in-person user groups (HUGs) for customer feedback, for example, reflect their commitment to customer relationships.

Buyer Experience

For small business or product-led sales companies, how good is the buyer’s checkout or renewal experience? Is it consistent with your brand promise of ease of doing business? If your product is complex and sold through direct sales and your brand promise is to offer industry expertise, does your site deliver that? Do your sales teams deliver on that when a prospect asks to contact sales? If your product’s business promise is to lower costs, where and how do you make this value visible during the sales process? Within a customer dashboard? In your quarterly updates? Through special industry audits? 

Employee Engagement

If your brand story includes commitments to address diversity or environmental issues, how are your employees engaged on these commitments? How committed are the leaders? If your story is “we are a great place to work and grow,” what are the iconic actions that set you apart from others in talent development? Do your Glassdoor ratings support the brand story?

Product Roadmap

Does your product roadmap support your brand promise of innovation? Does your price catalog support the affordability promise you make? Do your payment terms support the promise you make of ease of doing? If you are OSS as part of a brand story, how is your product strategy and engineering community supporting this?

Network | Marketplace

What are the critical brand commitments to your network of partners, suppliers, and marketplace? If services are a critical part of your brand promise, how strong and committed are your service partnerships? If community building is an important part of your story, what iconic actions showcase the work of the community? Slack and Stripe both demonstrate a strong network marketplace commitments with their app integrations, robust API, and in the case of Stripe, contributions to open-source software.

The bottom line is that brand stories that are poorly lived are worse than no stories at all. Because branding is an act of public commitment, every major breach calls into question your commitment. Like a person practicing virtues, it is better to practice without claiming than to preach the virtues and not act on them. 

The impact of branding, when lived right, shows up in several measures, including improved brand perception around key value attributes; stronger brand preference for the products, and enhanced brand advocacy and better brand satisfaction.

Key Takeaways

• A good brand story has three pillars: the promise of business value, an insight that sets you apart from others, and an offering that is robust enough to create the value. 
• Business customers have two different subtypes: users and buyers.
• The users care about getting a job done with your product, whereas the buyers care about the business value created through the use of your product. 
• A JTBD framework can help discover user value proposition and business value chain analysis can help map buyer value proposition
• A brand promise bridges the user’s job to the buyer’s value.
• For a tech company, a brand insight is based on product magic, which is how your tech solves a canonical use case.
• An offering is the product along with all the key capabilities, such as pricing needed to deliver value. 
• A good brand story rests on a foundation of commitments you make to support the story. 
• The first set of commitments are customer focused, especially around user journey and buyer journey and those tied to customer relationships. 
• The second set of commitments are company and market focused: to employees, to the product future, and to network and market partners. 
• To highlight some of these commitments, you should consider a set of iconic actions that others begin to recognize as examples of your commitments. 

This is Part 2 of a blog series on B2B tech branding. Part 1 Building a Tech Brand for Business; Part 3 Creating an Authentic Brand Story; Part 4 Brand Stories & Hero's Journey; Part 5 Building a Business Brand with a Collective Soul: Google Cloud Interview

References

• Jobs To Be Done; Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen; JTBD - Anthony Ulwick 
• Value Proposition Canvas by Alex Osterwalder et al
• Peter Thiel - Secret [ Zero to One]
• Brian Arthur - Nature of Technology
• Value Chain, Michael Porter