How the coronavirus outbreak is changing Business (B2B) Marketing

These are my edited notes from a talk I did for The Business Marketing Club on Wednesday 1st July. Dave Stevens expertly hosted, and I followed the brilliance of Sarah Donnelly, Marco Perotti and Lorraine Emmett.

The coronavirus changes to business marketing that I have experienced are threefold. These are three alliterative As, for ease:

Acceleration, Accountability and Authenticity

Firstly, Acceleration: digital communications and commerce alongside flexible/remote working.

Digital comms and commerce. The move to digital marketing and away from traditional methods of marketing.

Digital client interactions are now seen as twice as important as non-digital activity by clients. Before the crisis, this was 52:48 in favour of traditional (McKinsey).

People are embracing online content as a permanent trend rather than a temporary fad: podcasts, vlogs, the audio-video revolution.

I have seen the hurried adoption of previously rejected techniques, which would have been better implemented had we got ahead of the curve rather than trailed behind it.

The move to digital commerce – this works for things/stuff, can it work long-term for significant conferences and our most valuable transactions, e.g. talent and offices.

76% of B2B businesses have shifted either totally or mostly to remote selling with only 4% doing nothing as a result of Covid19 (McKinsey).

The cloud is going to get a lot cloudier (and busier).

Three years of development has taken three months.

Now we need to sort the sustainable from the rest.

Flexible working/remote working. The balance of evidence is that productivity has increased under home working, or has at least not fallen.

In one study, remote employees work 1.4 more days per month than their office-based counterparts, resulting in more than three additional weeks of work per year.

There will clearly be a polarisation of those who strongly favour office-working and those who strongly prefer home-working.

I think the last balance I saw was ~20% firmly in favour of home working and ~20% strongly against.

Who those people are and the role they play on Boards will determine future flexible/remote working policy.

There is evidence that home working has quite serious adverse work-life, gender, BAME and income effects, which leaderships really need to consider.

Homeworking and homeschooling are great if you have parents who can contribute, the right ergonomic workspace, and a good or safe working/schooling environment.

CFOs and FDs will be looking hard at the cost per square foot of some commercial space – think the rise of agoras, clubhouses rather than workhouses.

And people will be looking at home working space residentially which merges the business and the consumer space.

But there will be a backlash to the new normal (whatever that is), as people cling to the old and desire returning to it (people resist rapid change).

The accidental physical connections that we make face-to-face is a dominant player in business relationships.

Serendipity doesn’t really exist in zoom.

I wager some organisations will be more rigidly work-in-office only to counter the harmful effects of home working or to preserve company culture.

Accountability: any crisis puts massive pressure on both the top and bottom line and marketing, inevitably, is in the spotlight as either a non-essential cost or essential investment. For those who know me, this is a major bugbear of mine.

The move to “essential spend” often means short-sighted cutting of marketing budgets (50%) – but not everywhere. McKinsey reported on those who have increased B2B spending (1 in 4).

Isn’t marketing essential? The best companies have deemed it to be so.

Is marketing a cost or an investment? – the endless debate. The best companies see it as an investment.

We know businesses that maintain investment in their brand through a crisis (in creating opportunities to see the brand) come out of it much faster and far stronger.

John Wanamaker “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” This is lazy rubbish. This was late 19th/early 20th-century thinking.

We can know the ROI of everything and can attribute most marketing effects if we choose to do the legwork.

So much of marketing is free, apart from sourcing the right talent, internally or externally, to do it:

Social media, owned and shared content – text, audio, visual, user-generated content, earned content with public relations and permission email – and the good old telephone.

Authenticity: people are increasingly seeking genuine purpose in the organisations they buy from and for whom they work – not just in consumer markets but in business environments too.

I saw this in commercial property where property investors were looking at the Gender Balance, Inclusiveness and Diversity of suppliers, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility policies but also the reality of the companies they worked with.

This was not lip-service, greenwash, purpose-wash or impact-wash, but a real desire for authentic difference and action.

The brilliantly named Faith Popcorn wrote of the rise of the vigilante consumer in the 1990s, which has become a reality with social media, but we now have purpose-vigilantes who are on the hunt for virtue signalling.

Don’t be inauthentic, don’t lie – or we will be found out and called out.

Talent and business decision-makers will drift towards the authentic and purposeful.

So, the three overlapping changes I see on how the coronavirus outbreak is changing Business Marketing are increasing and broadening acceleration, ever greater accountability of marketing investment and scrutiny of a company’s real as opposed to claimed authenticity.