At DeSantis Breindel, we’ve been working on a number of exciting initiatives, including expanded offerings to reach B2B audiences in engaging ways, and a new community for B2B marketing leaders.
Helping our clients create exceptional customer experiences
While we’ve always worked with clients to bring their brands to life through strategic customer interactions, we have recently expanded our customer experience design practice, strengthening the counsel we offer our clients and deepening the relationships they have with their customers. We developed this practice in response to a frequent concern among B2B marketers that their brands don’t fully come alive and “move the needle” in terms of market share and revenue gains. In the B2B space, it is harder for brands to capture attention based on their products and services alone. Customer experience has increasingly become an opportunity for differentiation.
Our customer experience design offering includes persona building, customer journey mapping, experience ideation and innovation for key touchpoints, experience principles, activation training, and planning and implementation. This ensures that our clients can connect their brands to the right people at the appropriate times along their journey.
We have refined our offerings and approach through engagements with two leading national law firms, a global not-for-profit membership organization, and two major regional health systems. In all of these cases, we have helped clients innovate at the touchpoints that matter most to their clients, customers or patients, resulting in more relevant, differentiated and engaging experiences that drive choice, deepen loyalty and inspire advocacy.
Engaging audiences with rich branded content
As sophisticated B2B buyers increasingly tune out traditional forms of advertising, B2B marketers are recognizing the potential of branded content to engage their most important audiences. Our branded content offering combines the award-winning filmmaking expertise of our DB Productions subsidiary with our brand strategy, digital strategy and marketing activation capabilities.
One recent example is the This is Capitalism series, a collection of films about great American capitalists, like Helena Rubinstein, who embody the values of independence and innovation – part of our ongoing branding work for our client, investment banking firm, Stephens Inc.
Refining our approach: A lean and iterative method to branding around the globe
To stay ahead in a world of disruption and transformation, more and more clients are coming to us with tight timelines and the need to move at warp speed to build brands that resonate around the globe. In response, we have streamlined our approach, leveraging co-creation with our clients for better and quicker outcomes. We are big fans of using workshops to get at the core of what our clients stand for and to quickly build consensus around ideas. We use a series of interactive methodologies that engage our clients throughout the process, from information and perspective gathering to evaluating various brand strategy options.
We have seen particular success with the introduction of brand positioning territory workshops, which we conduct after only a few weeks of research. During this interactive session, we bring key insights and share emerging themes for where we could take the brand strategy, workshopping these ideas to test and validate potential positioning territories and generate consensus on which ideas to fully develop.
In 2017, we conducted these types of workshops in multiple countries, including Spain, China, Belgium and the Netherlands, to discover – in partnership with our clients – what makes their companies tick. This sort of co-creation always leads to stronger, more on-target brands. And it’s a lot of fun, too.
Building a stronger B2B CMO community
In working closely with clients from a range of industries, we have been struck by how much they have in common beyond their shared focus on building their brands. This is why in late 2017 we launched Huddle, a community of B2B marketing leaders who want to connect, learn, and grow with likeminded professionals from a variety of industries.
Huddle includes a curated program of in-person gatherings and virtual events. It is designed to empower successful marketers to develop lasting, meaningful relationships with their peers and catalyze mutual personal and professional growth. This atmosphere fosters honest and open collaboration intended to drive change via practical problem solving and spark inspiration through sharing success stories.
The first formal meeting of Huddle members was held in November 2017 and included an interactive session with executives from Forrester’s CMO research group who offered an exclusive first look at their latest research on human-centered branding and customer obsession. That session, and the entire two-day event, received outstanding feedback from all participants, and planning is well underway for 2018 Huddle events.
These are just a few of the exciting things going on at DeSantis Breindel — we’d welcome the opportunity to connect with you on these and other ways we can work together to build your B2B brand.
In collaborating closely with our clients – marketing leaders across a range of industries – we have been struck by how much they have in common beyond their shared focus on building and maximizing their brands. Whether it’s making headway in specific functional areas such as lead-generation or digital engagement, influencing corporate strategy, or getting…
Customer experience. The phrase has become ubiquitous in branding and marketing circles. In the B2C world, its relevance is obvious: delight your customers at every “touchpoint,” whether on your website, in a retail environment, on the phone, or when they’re using your product or service.
But what does customer experience mean in the B2B…