SAS’ Edge Case: SAS' Journey from Convention to Creativity

By Haley Pierce , Market Engagement Lead at the B2B Institute

Introducing Edge Cases From The B2B Institute

At the B2B Institute, we’re inspired by B2B brands who bet on contrarian ideas. We celebrate the B2B marketers who aren’t afraid to break standard patterns of behavior to get a leg up on their competition.?

This notion of breaking patterns to see extraordinary results is called an “Edge Case” and originates from the fields of computer science, software engineering, and quality assurance. Edge cases are often characterized by being unusual or exceptional scenarios that exist at the boundaries or extremes of the input space.??

Being the contrarian-obsessed and empirically-inspired individuals that we are, we came across this concept and determined that it perfectly describes our B2B Edge customers. They see outstanding results because their approach is out of the ordinary. We’re featuring these brilliant B2B brands and the B2B marketers behind them in a new series called “Edge Cases,” so you too can learn from their bold approach.?

SAS: A Tale of Brand Pioneers

We’re starting with SAS, a brand whose story is all too familiar in B2B marketing: a company where lead gen reigned supreme and brand building was a mere afterthought. However, what makes this story so unique is the journey that the stellar marketers at SAS embarked on to transform their organization. We’re inspired by their determination to drive change at a 40+ year-old technology company and their steadfast commitment to marketing effectiveness. Read on to learn how SAS went from a rational, performance marketing engine to a creative, full-funnel machine. This is SAS’ Edge Case.

Competing In A Crowded And Rapidly Growing Category?

Founded over 48 years ago, SAS paved the way for innovation in business intelligence and data analytics. SAS’ solutions transform data into intelligence to empower people around the world to make better decisions and bold new discoveries. Despite SAS being an early entrant, over the last decade they found themselves in an increasingly crowded category. As a brand, SAS relied on the effectiveness and efficiency of their lead generation engine. They operated like a classical B2B company – their campaigns focused on converting in-market buyers with rational, direct-response messaging. With new competition, SAS realized that they needed to take a different approach to compete and re-set their brand for long-term success. They needed to invest in brand awareness.?

Becoming a “Full-Funnel Family”

Jenn Chase, SAS’ CMO, knew that brand awareness would be key to driving long-term growth, but to drive adoption internally, she first needed to shift perspectives amongst her largely demand-focused marketing organization and partners in sales and finance. She needed the right proof points to convince them that brand drives demand, and that demand outcomes are stronger with higher brand awareness. She shared her commitment to this internal change: “The major mindset shifts we needed to have within our organization is that it wasn't brand versus demand – it’s brand and demand. Being able to demonstrate the impact that brand has on demand and how demand can be more effective when it pulls off of brand has been a significant focus for us.”

Through our brand consultancy program, B2B Edge, we collaborated with SAS to guide their transformation. Jenn and her leadership team embraced B2B Institute research concepts like the Cash Flow Funnel and 95-5 Rule, which signals the importance of advertising to the 95% of out-market buyers as they represent future cash flows. Binet and Field's 60-40 principle guided their budget allocation between brand and demand campaigns, providing a roadmap in uncharted territory. Leveraging these insights, Jenn educated and garnered support from both sides of the team, fostering a cohesive approach to full-funnel marketing at SAS. Elizabeth (Bess) Creech, SAS’ Director of Digital, underscored the synergy between brand and demand: “Brand and demand work better together. I don't see it as a brand or demand – it's brand and demand, and they have to come together, align their KPIs to create that full funnel strategy that's really going to raise all of the marketing that we're doing, not just the advertising”.?

Learning From ‘Curiosity Forever’

At the B2B Institute, we consider brand building a craft, not a task. There’s no secret sauce or magic pill to build your brand – it takes years of practice and refinement to get it right.?

SAS secured the right commitment and resources necessary to invest in brand – they garnered internal buy-in, brought on a world-class creative agency, McCann New York, and established a formal brand marketing team. And these foundational steps enabled them to properly bet big and launch their first brand campaign in two decades: Curiosity Forever.?While this milestone was tremendous, the work didn’t stop there. The campaign revealed an opportunity to shift their strategy to better focus on SAS’ latest technology: SAS Viya.

‘Curiosity Forever’ proved to be only a step in their brand journey but an important one as it informed the evolution of their brand campaign and their future long-term positioning. Jenn shared her advice for other B2B marketers at this critical juncture: “Hold strong on your commitment to brand investment. You will be challenged on it throughout the process. So in order to help with that, what you need to do is make sure that your brand strategy is very well aligned to your company's long term goals.”

Launching ‘SAS Viya’

As SAS prepared to launch SAS Viya, a campaign to promote their eponymous AI and Analytics platform, we collaborated to refine their approach across three key areas: reach, messaging, and branding. As a data and analytics company, SAS welcomed the insights-driven concepts we introduced, and infused their own learnings from ‘Curiosity Forever.’ Natalie Osborn, SAS’ VP of Brand Marketing and Creative, summarized the changes they made:

1. Reach: “We're looking to reach our broad, out-market audience at the brand marketing level and our in-market audience at the performance marketing level.”?
2. Messaging: “For messaging, we're looking to align around category entry points to ensure that those carry throughout the funnel, and it's not new information at the end of the funnel."?
3. Branding: “Finally, it's branding with our distinctive brand assets, making sure we're instantly recognizable in the market."

Reach: Following The 95-5 Rule

The 95-5 rule played a crucial role in SAS’ approach to targeting. They recognized the limitations of solely focusing on the 5% of in-market buyers and realized the necessity of broadening their audience to achieve better demand outcomes. For ‘SAS Viya,’ the SAS team adopted a reach maximalist approach, prioritizing reach over frequency and expanding their audience to include both current and future buyers. Mirko Mueller-Goolsbey, SAS’ Director of Brand Marketing discussed their strategic shift: “We focused on thinking less about frequency and more about reach … reaching more future and current category buyers instead of just bombarding them over and over again with the same message,” while Bess added, “broadening our audience gave us scale that we didn't have before.”

Messaging: Linking To Category Entry Points

In collaboration with SAS, we pinpointed crucial buying situations in the business intelligence category known as Category Entry Points (CEPs). Coined by our partners at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, CEPs help marketers associate their brand with relevant buying situations (i.e. think Corona’s “find your beach” campaign) by determining where brands have opportunities for mental advantages. SAS leveraged the analysis, and insights drawn from their brand study, to understand which CEPs were most important to focus on in the campaign. This work helped SAS translate their most important customer needs into compelling stories ensuring relevance for their nuanced global audience. SAS then worked with their agency of record to carry the CEP messaging throughout their ads across the customer funnel.?

Branding: Standing Out In A Sea of Sameness

Finally, the team looked critically at their brand assets (i.e. logos, characters, icons) to understand which were more memorable and attributable to SAS. Through our Distinctive Brand Asset (DBA) testing, SAS learned that the word “Viya” resonated disproportionately with a high degree of association. Additional creative and design-level research helped them identify an opportunity to stand out by featuring SAS’ pink cube brand asset more prominently in their campaign creative. Natalie shared the importance of the testing to inform their creative: “The distinctive brand asset work identified for us which of our brand assets were working and which needed to have more work behind them... And drove us to select Viya as an important part of our newest brand campaign.” Mirko added that the cube became a recognizable and “distinct brand asset device to more easily anchor us into memory.”

SAS put these insights to action using subtle humor, and highly creative interpretations of their CEPs:

Finding Their Edge

The ‘SAS Viya’ campaign was massively successful. SAS’ evolved approach to targeting, messaging and branding produced a highly engaging and creative campaign and achieved the following effectiveness and efficiency results on LinkedIn:

• 3x increase to Lead Gen Form completion rates
• 31% increase in engagement rates
• 9M new buyers reached on LinkedIn in 6 months
• 28% decrease in Cost per Lead?

This impact was not felt in isolation: sales leaders also saw improved sales outreach following the launch of ‘SAS Viya,’ and talent leaders saw improved acquisition outcomes. SAS’ Edge Case is a testament to the compounding value of brand investment, and the business-wide benefits of having a strong brand.

Jenn shared this excitement around the campaign’s impact, saying, “We looked at the performance of the brand campaign in and of itself, and then what is the knock on effect that that brand campaign is having. We were able to demonstrate how our brand campaign was helping our talent acquisition efforts, was helping our sales teams outreach to new clients, and it was lifting the performance of our overall marketing campaigns, both brand and demand.”

Brand building is not a quick or easy process. It requires discipline, patience and resilience to excel.?Congratulations to the brand pioneers at SAS – we couldn’t think of a better brand to highlight for their commitment to the craft of brand building. Thank you for trusting us to be part of your journey and for inspiring us along the way!

To learn more about our brand consultancy program, B2B Edge, and how we can help you apply B2B Institute research to your marketing strategy, visit our website or reach out to your LinkedIn account rep.?