Quick – what’s the easiest way to squander your B2B advertising budget? The answer: run a classic B2B campaign.
What many B2B brands seem to forget is that people who work in business are humans, too. And while business decisions are supposedly made based on purely rational considerations, that’s far from the truth. This fundamental misunderstanding underlying much B2B advertising leads to tens of millions of squandered advertising spending every year, across both traditional media and digital channels.
If you don’t believe me, ask Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman delineates two modes of thinking: “System 1” is instantaneous, driven by instinct and emotion; “System 2” is slower, driven by deliberation and logic. Kahneman hones several decades of research to emphasize how people attribute far too much importance to ‘rational’ human judgments in decision-making. He explains that even when we believe we are making decisions based on rational considerations, our System 1 beliefs, biases and intuition drive much of our thinking.
Business people have their own notions about brands, many of which are held within their System 1 belief systems. And much of what resides in the System 1 belief system are impressions yielded from one’s own experiences. When it comes to brands that market to both consumers and B2B targets, the business target has deep-seated impressions of the brand that affect their decision-making. And where do those come from? In large part, consumer advertising.
It seems fairly obvious when stated: B2B targets see consumer advertising. In most cases, your B2B target sees more of your brand’s consumer-targeted advertising than she does your B2B advertising. But would you know this from the B2B marketer’s tendency to lean toward the bland and rational approach when advertising to business purchasers?
For brands selling both to consumers and business buyers, B2B advertising works as a supplement to consumer advertising – it is not the main focus. In one recent study for a Communicus client, 86% of business decision-makers saw the brand’s advertising overall, with 85% seeing the consumer campaign and 29% seeing the B2B campaign. So just 1% saw only the B2B ads, and 56% saw only the consumer ads. These are typical advertising engagement rates from our research. So it follows that the campaign theme and brand positioning need to be synergistic, amplifying what the B2B target has come to believe about the brand via their exposure to the brand’s consumer advertising.
Daniel Kahneman’s insights, so beloved by consumer marketers, apply just as much to B2B: Develop your B2B advertising so that the target remembers the brand in a way that builds and enhances a (non-rational) connection to the brand in their System 1 thinking. Rational ad sells don’t work any better among B2B targets than they do among consumer targets.
Despite what many marketers and agencies would like to think (after all, accounts, jobs and entire careers depend on it), peoples’ appetite to engage with specific ads is not simply a function of “exposure opportunities.” It’s not even wholly dependent on the breakthrough power of the creative. The hard truth is, inclination toward engaging with your brand will fluctuate on an individual level, and it will do so based on how well the brand and its story resonates with what that individual already believes to be true. Kahneman refers to this as our inherent ‘confirmation bias’. The moral: What a B2B decision-maker believes to be true about your brand based on her experiences as a consumer will strongly color whether she engages with and is persuaded by your B2B campaign.
For every company that inherently gets this concept and advertises accordingly, there are dozens more that don’t. Those who strategize based on a deep understanding of how people think and make decisions will benefit in the highly competitive B2B marketing arena. Which camp does your brand fall into?
Jeri Smith CEO Communicus
