B2B vs B2C Marketing. What's the Difference? | BTalk

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Fran Brosan

(Episode 429; 15 minutes 08) Consumer marketing is all about developing an emotive response from the prospective customer, so the decision to buy is based as much on a feel-good factor as it is about the functionality and differentiation of your product.

In the business space the decision to buy generally involves a lot more money and a wider range of people. Surely that means the decisions made are made on far more rational grounds. No room for touchy-feely stuff here!

Well, that might be right to an extent but, as Fran Brosan from UK marketing agency Omobono points out, the decision to buy or continue to buy is based on relationships. The B2B marketer plays a crucial role influencing how these relationships are developed.

Hear Fran's views on the difference between B2B and B2C marketing in today's BTalk podcast. Add your views on the differences in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

Fran is also a regular contributor to the blog at B2B Marketing Online, which is where I came across her.

• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello. I'm Phil Dobbie. Welcome to BTalk. Today, marketingto businesses versus marketing to consumers. Is there really any difference between the two?
Well, I've been a marketer for a long time. But most of my career has been in marketing to the consumer. And B2C marketing I can understand. It's all about getting the product right and getting the offer right. And selling through the best channels. But what about selling to business customers? That's a different story, isn't it? Or is it? What are the big differences between B2C and B2B marketing? Fran Brosan is a regular contributor to the B2B marketing blog, as well as being the MD of Omobono --- a digital communications agency in Cambridge, very nice, in the United Kingdom. As well as having worked on many consumer brands like Catameat. Well, I don't know. Is that a consumer brand? It's really for cats, isn't it? Really maybe the B2C marketing there. The C stands for cat. So Fran, what are the big differences do you think between B2B and B2C marketing? Or maybe there aren't any. Maybe they're the same thing.
Fran Brosan: People always think that B2B marketing is really about a very rational decision-making process. And there's a lot of academic research and articles bout the DMU. I don't know if you've heard of that. The decision-making unit. And, you know, people talk about cost-benefit analysis. And they're sort of implying that actually there's nothing that you can do in communications terms to influence people's buying decisions. It's all about, you know, rational.

Dobbie: Right.
Brosan: Actually, we think that's completely wrong. Effectively, you know, the pace of change in the world today. It's just so immense. It's incredibly hard to create product differentiation. And even if you do create it, it's gone in an instant. You know, products can be copied overnight basically. So if you think that if, as a business buyer, you're choosing between two companies, the products are going to be incredibly similar. And/or the service may be incredibly similar. And actually therefore, what people do is make the decision about which company they prefer to work with. So actually what starts off as a sort of rational analysis ends up, like many other purchasing decisions, as a sort of emotional decision about who do I feel comfortable with? Who do I trust? Who do I think is going to be around for a long time as a good business partner? And also really importantly a lot of factors, like financial services: who is going help me and my business move forward? So I'm not just buying, if you like, an insurance product or a service. I'm thinking okay, so I'm going to buy that. But what else am I going to get from this company? And those are very emotional judgments.

Dobbie: So those emotive reactions, which obviously is key to B2C marketing, you're saying are just as important in B2B marketing. So the tools that we use to do that, such as how we send out advertising messages, that's equally as applicable then you're saying in the B2B space.
Brosan: Yes, I think it is. I think we should never underestimate our ability as marketers to influence purchase decisions. But I think that one of the things that is absolutely different in B2B is it's just not so easy or simple, straightforward, as it is in B2C. And, you know, you rightly said in your intro of what's in B2C comms. And, you know, it's fantastic. You work on something like BMW or a beer brand, you do a television commercial and you reach, you know, a lot of your target audience. Or you do some press advertising and you reach a lot of your target audience. Broadcast mechanisms don't work so well in B2B because simply the audiences are just much, much smaller. And sometimes, quite frankly, there isn't really a publication that's going to reach them. And anything that's really broadcast is incredibly high-wastage, so it becomes sort of economically not a sensible decision. So one of the biggest issues about B2B is that you have to think when you are communicating of a whole raft of different communications mechanisms just automatically.

Dobbie: Yes.
Brosan: I mean there was a study, gosh, ten years ago now that said there were on average 14 different channels being used by B2B marketeers to reach their target audiences. Down to very specific things like doing some sort of PR or advertising in their customer's newsletters. Because the press doesn't exist for them, you sort of have to go and create or go into whatever press is available for your target market. Because the target market can be so small.

Dobbie: Yes. So I guess that's why, you know, it is all about relationships, isn't it? Building relationships. I mean we talk about one-to-one marketing in the consumer space. But in the B2B space, when we talk about one-to-one marketing, we really are talking about that, aren't we? We're talking about a target customer.
Brosan: I think relationship marketing is a particularly good expression for it. And it is one-to-one. But of course those one-to-one relationships aren't just done by the marketing department. They're done by the organisation. You know, there's a very interesting concept called part-time marketers, which is really applicable to B2B. Because if you think about an organisation, if you're doing business with a company you are often dealing with lots of people, different people or different departments. So your company has lots of interactions with the company that you're doing business with. Say the finance departments might be talking to each other. The development people might be talking to their technical people. Your salespeople are talking to their distribution people. You know, it's a really sort of complex set of relationships. And as a marketer, you know, it's those conversations that are going on between people that are influencing how keen people are to keep on buying from you. And going back to what I was saying earlier about building the relationship, building the trust, building the sense of who do you want to work with. Now as a marketer you're actually not involved in those conversations. But you're a full-time marketer whose job is to promote the company. But I just think there's something really interesting going on, particularly at the moment, where marketers are getting much more involved in sort of helping these part-time marketers with what it is they're saying and how they're behaving. And how they can really channel positive messages through the interaction they have with the person on the other end of that string.

Dobbie: Yes. I mean it is interesting as to where the boundaries of marketing sit in any organisation. But I guess if you're selling a business solution, in the B2C space I always think, you know, in a well-adjusted company the marketing department has quite a lot of influence, because they're there helping determine not just how you sell a product. But what it is that you're selling. What the product actually is.
Brosan: Yes.

Dobbie: You know, in a lot of business situations it looks as though the marketing role is often a very junior role. And is very often just almost like a presales function or a sales support function.
Brosan: Yes. I think you're absolutely right. And it's a sort of vicious circle really I think, you know, going back to the idea that those, you know, B2B budgets tend to be smaller. And therefore, one of the impacts is that of course if you're a really talented marketer you want to go where the big budgets are. And as an agency person, you know, you might want to do big TV commercials so that you can go into the department and say hey, you know, I worked on this. You can see it on the television. And you want to win a, you know, a prize at Cannes. But if you look at the really big companies, the really big global corporates, they take marketing extremely seriously. And they have definitely moved away from what I call the sort of brochure department.

Dobbie: Yes.
Brosan: It's not down the corridor that you'd say can you just give me a brochure to help me sell something. That presale function.

Dobbie: And here's the typeface I want. And here's the colour of the brochure.
Brosan: Yes. And so, you know, one of the things we do is help our clients think that how they come out of that promotional corner and take a much more active role in the, not just product development, but also really importantly service development for companies. Because your experience of a B2B company is not through buying a product or seeing a TV ad. It's about the experience of working with somebody day-to-day. Now a lot of that's done of course now on a computer.

Dobbie: Right.
Brosan: So actually what is sent down the wires as an email, or what you see on a website is not just any longer a sort of promotional message. It's just not enough. You have to think how is the experience that these people are having, or finding information, or receiving information from us. How is that better than our competitor's experience? And that actually turns B2B marketers into real contributors to a company's excellence, a company's service levels. And it makes communications really much more interesting and much more challenging. So I hope over the next ten years, as it were, we'll see some real resurgence of serious marketing within B2B companies.

Dobbie: Yes, I can see that. And governing the ability to influence many more parts of the business and how they interact. Now do you think a good B2C marketer can make the switch and become a good B2B marketer?
Brosan: I'd say yes, because that's what I did. Well, from one to the other.

Dobbie: But you might be an exception.
Brosan: No. I think that actually the truth is it's all good marketing practise. When we help clients think through specific B2B issues, fundamentally what you're doing is the same thing. You're thinking very carefully about your target audience. You're thinking about what they want to hear from you, rather than what you want to say. Yes, of course the mechanisms are, as we've discussed, slightly more complex. And so it's helpful to naturally think oh, the solution to this isn't a TV ad. It's a whole heap of things in a number of different ways. But the practices are pretty much the same. I think really to be a good B2B marketer, what you've really got to do is be interested in business itself. You know, when I worked on cat food, ultimately the only thing we talked to the client about was cat food advertising. And there's so much more to business than the advertising bit of it.

Dobbie: Yes.
Brosan: And you don't really see that as a B2B, a B2C marketer. Whereas in B2B the first thing you start with is what are the business objectives? What is this company trying to achieve here? And how can we use a whole range of different techniques to help them achieve that? So that's I suppose why more than anything I've stayed in it and really, really love it. It's because you just get so deep into the business. And businesses are fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Even if they make the most technical grommet in the world, the way that business runs and distributes around the world and the partners that it needs to work with. And the supply chain and how that all comes together is gripping.

Dobbie: Right. And it's ...
Brosan: Yes. I find it so gripping. I love it.

Dobbie: I know. I was thinking you were singing it all from the agency's side of course, so that will have influenced your B2C experience because you're on the agency side. And agencies always get handed their communications job rather than all elements of the marketing I guess.
Brosan: Yes.

Dobbie: So that might explain that. Now what about measurement? I mean it's fairly easy in the B2C space, isn't it? You can track commercials. You can see how many sales you've made at the end of the day. In B2B marketing how do you do that? How do you know whether you're doing a good job or not?
Brosan: I would argue quite simply: is your company doing quite well?

Dobbie: Yes.
Brosan: And it all comes down to whether or not the business is doing well. And of course a lot of people look at things like customer satisfaction surveys as being a way of measuring whether or not you're doing the right things. Yes, of course, you know, in some instances you're looking at acquisitions, so you might be looking at sort of how effective your lead generation program is. But there are all sorts of measures. I mean you'll look at repeat purchase levels. You might look at how much share of wallet you've got from key customers who would also be typically working with your competitors. So are you getting more from that customer than your competitors are getting? So there are a whole heap of different measures in B2B that can be used to help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign. I was talking to Professor Malcolm McDonald the other day who's sort of a marketing guru. He's very, written a lot of books about marketing segmentation. And we were talking about ROI. And this is a guy who's written loads of books and is incredibly knowledgeable. And he just laughed and he said ROIs are nonsense. He said it's like asking somebody to tell you what the ROI is on the wings of an aircraft.

Dobbie: Well, it depends. I know. I was going to say that earlier, you know. It does depend. ROI always depends on how you're going to measure it. And you can measure it in umpteen different ways and get umpteen different answers, can't you?
Brosan: Yes. You can. And I personally think that it's a sort of obsession that is driven by the fact that marketing people obviously have to answer to boards. And boards look at figures, and so they want the line that says okay, here's the input. Oops! Here's my expenditure. Oops! Let me just see what profit I've generated as a direct result of that expenditure. And it's just not that linear a point of view. I think that just goes back to what we were saying earlier where, in fact, if you look at marketing slightly differently and think that marketing's job is not to spend money on promotional items. But it's actually to help the company improve its product and service and deliver a better experience for customers. Then in fact it's sort of not spending money so much as helping the company align itself behind customer delivery. And particularly last year, you know, when budgets were cutting, being cut left, right and centre, I heard some marketing people say well, what's my job if I don't have a promotional budget? And the answer is well, your job is actually to get into the company and make sure that it is totally delivering to customers.

Dobbie: Yes.
Brosan: And some of the stuff that you need to do doesn't really cost money. It doesn't cost money to write more effective emails. It just takes time and brains.

Dobbie: Yes, that's right. Just work your way through all of those customer touch points, which I guess is a big chunk of what B2B marketing is all about.
Brosan: Yes.

Dobbie: So if you're in a B2C role at the moment and you're finding it a bit one-dimensional, it's possibly your own fault if you are. But it sounds like a switch to B2B might be a more rewarding experience and allow you to get more to grips with the various elements of the company that you're working for.
Brosan: Well, that's one way of looking at it, Phil. Yes.

Dobbie: Fran, appreciate your time today.
Brosan: Thanks very much.

Dobbie: That's Fran Brosan.