Kathryn Roy on Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing - and Their Cures

Over on Marketing Profs, Kathryn Roy has a great article on B2B Marketing. This is premium content that you have to pay to get at, so I can’t very well give it away here, but she’s spot on in her clever, and voice of experience, rundown on "rampant in B2B companies."

One of "Dr. Roy’s" diseases is the one that infects companies that put together really beautiful and glitzy ads that end up going nowhere. She lists some suspected causes, but I think she’s missing a key one: putting the messaging in the hands of people who may be capable of producing really beautiful and glitzy ads, but really have no clue whatsoever what your product/company does, or who they do it for. Instead, they get swept up in the craft and creativity, leaving the people who see the ad scratching their heads. My personal case in point: the Black Rocket ads that Genuity produced. Lots of money - and I do mean lots of money - spent on ads that were very clever but resulted in not one sale.

Another of her diseases is suffered by those "marketing departments whereby marketing professionals are so focused on execution, they skip the planning stage—and pay the price."

My friend Sean has a term for this: activity without action. And we’ve all been here, with the roster of "things" that prove that we’ve been busy. Unfortunately, we may have been busy doing things that make no real sense. We’ve been going to trade shows that are too generic. We’ve been going after an audience that’s not squarely on target. We’ve been creating collateral that reads well but might not be helping the cause. Why? Probably because we’ve been so busy doing more or less what we’ve always done, we haven’t allotted any time to ask ourselves the big questions about who we are, what we’re good for, and who we’re good for. This is precisely why, whenever I start with a new client that wants to jump and get going - let’s do something - I try to steer them towards some preliminary work in which we get their story down and agreed to. It’s amazing how much more relevant and useful your to-do list can become if you make sure it squares with that story.

Kathryn also rights about the desire to overwhelm with detail in collateral, websites, and preso’s. I think this is especially prevalent in technology companies, where we have all this cool, nerdy detail we want to talk about. I’m with Kathryn here - especially when she talks about the mega-PowerPoint presos that we sometimes use to hypnotize our prospects. She points out that there are "phases in the buying process when prospects might take time to read information in depth," but that, especially early on, you need to keep your message simple and memorable. I do have a suggestion here, however, which is that it is generally useful to have the full complement of detail available before you start coming up with the pithy bullet points. If you start too small, you might end up missing something important.

Other diseases that Kathryn notes are one suffered by companies that advertise without making an offer, and the opposite number, suffered by companies that are in love with cheesy "Ginzu-knife" style calls to action. She suggests the old standbys for B2B - whitepapers or analyst reports that someone might find sufficiently useful that they’re willing to give up some information about themselves.

She also has a brief riff on brand marketing, i.e., coming up with all sorts of clever product names without having the ability (or, frankly, need) to burn them into our consciousness with the sorts of advertising and promotional campaigns that the big consumer goods company can and do invest in. I’ve said this plenty of times over the years: in B2B (technology) the product name is generally irrelevant. What to people say when you ask them what they use? 99% of the time, they’ll say IBM, or Oracle, or Microsoft - without giving a thought to the product name. There are exceptions, of course. (We do know that PowerPoint is a product name. In fact, it’s probably become such a Kleenex-like term that, if there is another presentation maker in existence, people probably call it PowerPoint.) But, mostly, for B2B the brand is the company name. So you don’t need to go crazy coming up with product names (although it’s generally best to come up with a naming scheme that is consistent, makes sense, and can be used internally - which is mostly where it’ll be used).

Her final disease is the B2B tendency to glom on to analysts’ categories as if they have any meaning in the "real world." Yes, eventually, some of these categories, through sheer force of Gartner will or because they really make some conceptual sense, do catch on. One that she mentions is Talent Management, which she cites as initially confusing to people, but which through consistent use she believes is catching on. Personally, I hate it, but I’ve already ranted about it here.

In any case, Kathryn Roy’s article is fun and worth a look - just to see the names that she coins for her Seven Infectious Diseases - even if you do have to pay for the privilege.

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