In a crowded market, it can be tough for brands to find whitespace. Identifying an ownable market positioning while maintaining brand authenticity is infinitely harder — but doing so is imperative for a brand’s ongoing success.
Our client, CDISC, was facing this challenge. CDISC began as a grassroots, nonprofit organization determined to develop and advance…
Much has been written about brand agility, the idea that a strong brand needs to remain true to core principles while always remaining open to new ideas. But this is easier said than done, especially for legacy brands. When a brand conjures up an indelible image in the minds of its customers, deviating from that…
Now, more than ever, a B2B website is the front page of a brand. As many businesses shift their focus from the conferences and in-person events that have historically driven so much of B2B sales and engagement, they are considering how to better leverage their digital presence and connect with prospects in new ways…
Companies rebrand for myriad reasons, and each resulting brand is — or should be — unique. But there are four essential elements shared by winning B2B brand strategies: authenticity, individuality, cohesion, and adaptability.
1. Authenticity: Stay true to your brand foundations
All brand strategy engagements should result in an authentic brand. And brand strategy is not always…
Brand positioning. It’s a concept pioneered by branding legends Jack Trout and Al Ries in the 1960s that has since become the essential foundation upon which all of an organization’s marketing is based —from print campaigns to digital engagement, sales outreach to recruitment efforts, content strategy to customer journey mapping. Defined as the…
One of the biggest takeaways from our recent discussions with B2B marketing leaders is that their roles can be lonely. B2B marketing teams are often smaller than those at their B2C counterparts, and CMOs’ peer executives frequently underestimate the value of brand. What’s more, there are few convening opportunities for B2B marketing leaders; CMO…
There’s been a fundamental shift in how business is conducted. Businesses can use LinkedIn, blog posts, and social media to reach customers in new, unexpected ways, and the purchasing process itself has become more informal. Rather than relying on the formal pitch and conference call, companies are constantly interacting. They’re looking to form…
The digital landscape evolves rapidly — new trends seem to surface weekly. And as digital natives become decision-makers at their companies, they’ll expect B2B marketing to merge with broader digital innovations.
Here a four B2B digital trends that will keep companies competitive in this changing marketing landscape.
1. Personalization
As account-based marketing (ABM…
According to the Harvard Business Review, “study after study puts the failure rate of mergers at somewhere between 70-90%.” More often than not, brand is not promoted or leveraged to provide unity, clarity and solidarity during this critical inflection point, yet brand can make all the difference between success and failure for the companies…
We recently found ourselves in the following conversation:
Client: We need to engage employees in our company’s new mission. We need your help with the execution of the communications campaign. We already have the positioning and messaging. The CEO wrote it.
DB: Oh, that’s great. What kind of research was conducted in developing…
Getting the green light to undertake a rebranding project is a moment to savor. You’ve got a mandate and a budget: time to hit the ground running. But you’re going to need an agency partner — even companies with in-house capabilities often go outside for fresh perspectives and expanded resources. So you’re…
Technology has been a business game-changer at every level — revolutionizing customer experience, enabling groundbreaking innovations, and accelerating the speed of business. Technology giants are expanding their reach while companies with decidedly non-tech histories like Maersk and even McDonald’s have reinvented themselves to excel in the digital era.
B2B tech companies need to…
In the months and years ahead, what should B2B marketers expect from branding design trends? For better or worse, pretty much what they’ve been seeing in consumer marketing for the past few years.
In early March 2020, New York magazine published an article asking “Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?” Its author, Molly Fisher…
What is brand experience? Yashumi Kasumi, Innovation and Creative Manager at IKEA, says,“A brand experience resembles the experiences you have with the people in your life…[it is] literally everything you have seen and heard — or even felt or smelt or tasted — about a brand.” This reflects a shift in the meaning of the…
In 2015, a year marked by unprecedented M&A activity in the technology industry, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (itself a spin-off) made headlines with its announcement of plans to spin-off its technology services operations and merge them with those of Computer Sciences. As then-Chief Executive Meg Whitman told it, the deal was…
Keeping the world safe from cybercrime is big business. In 2019, the cybersecurity market totaled $112 billion annually. By 2027, the market is expected to swell to more than $282 billion annually, an annual growth rate of over 12 percent, according to Fortune Business Insights. The reasons for this massive growth include the increasing prominence…
In 2018, there were more nearly 50,000 M&A transactions around the world. From tech to healthcare, consolidation is on the rise, and companies small and large are placing their bets on M&A activity as a strategic driver of growth. In this environment, it’s safe to assume that most B2B…
Successful B2B brands are built from the inside out. A company’s own people are the living embodiment of the brand in a way that is rarely the case with consumer businesses. How a B2B company’s people act, speak and even think will be far more effective in communicating the brand’s promise than…