Inside the Psychology of Branding

Business-to-business marketers are spending millions on communications that have about as much chance of reaping rewards as Marilyn Manson has of getting a VIP seat at a Jerry Falwell prayer meeting. Why? Because most of the messages that B-to-B marketers are putting forth don't take into account what prospects are really buying, what their prospects are interested in hearing about, and what their prospects already think of the marketer's product. Instead, business communications is overpopulated with messages that are so inward focused they amount to little more than companies telling themselves how great they and their products are.

Welcome To the Land of Me, Myself and I

The awful truth is that the only relevant opinion out there is your customer's and your prospect's. Not yours. Not your agency's. Not even your company president's. So even though statements like, "America's largest whatever" or "the computer industry's premier what-cha-ma-call-it," may warm the hearts of your management, they mean very little to your prospects. In other words, they are irrelevant ideas. They are, in fact, corporate belches: loud noises which no one is particularly waiting to hear, and don't impress those who happen to hear them.

If you don't think this is a problem in your industry, just pick up a trade magazine or a few direct marketing pieces. You'll have to dodge excessive amounts of corporate belching. In fact, if you visit these same companies' web sites, you'd think that the corporate belch is THE big idea that integrates all their communications.

You're likely to find interactive menus that read something like this:

• Our Brilliant History




• How We Make Thingees




• All of Our Press Releases of the Last Century

The point is that belches, even when they are integrated into every medium, will get you nowhere. The only difference is that when they're on the Internet, they're cyberbelches, which will get you nowhere much faster and this is exactly where most corporate web sites take prospects: nowhere, fast.

In fact, at this very moment, thousands of business marketers all over the planet are devising sophisticated strategies to tell prospects all the things that they (the marketers) want them (the prospects) to know about their products. Unfortunately, these are seldom the things that prospects are interested in hearing about. So they don't. Most prospects will simply ignore the messages and the marketers. Even worse, many business marketers think they are selling one thing, but buyers believe they are buying something totally different.

For example, in the area of third-party computer tech service such as computer equipment and systems repair and help desk call centers and the like, most companies sell very inward-looking, limiting ideas in their communications. They sell their facilities, their quality service force and/or their dependability.

Prospects, on the other hand, buy something very different. OEMs buy a way to protect their end-user relationships from competitors who offer service. They also buy a way to broaden and deepen these relationships and thereby increase their cash flow and revenue streams. The only way computer tech service companies are ever going to reach these OEM prospects is by drastically reorienting their messages to talk about the prospect's business. Not their own. The results can be impressive. When one service provider did just this, they increased their awareness by 106% and their usage by 335%. In six months.

Your Front End is Out of Whack

Wrapped up somewhere in that mess of mismatched messages, expectations and beliefs are two implications for business marketers. The first is that eventually you're going to have to put everything you want to communicate to prospects in terms of what's in it for them. In the process, you must also delineate a position for your product, service, or company that's relevant to the way your potential customers see their business. Not the way you view yours.

Another example comes from a business software company that believed that they were selling highly sophisticated, geodemographic mapping programs to marketers. But marketers, we discovered, didn't see it that way. To them, their job was not about making maps. Their job was to make decisions. So they weren't particularly interested in buying sophisticated, hi-tech mapping software. But they were very interested in buying "decisionware."

Don't Be Blinded by What You Sell, or What You Think You Sell. You Might Be Wrong.

It's not so much what you are, but what they think you are. It's not so much what you think you're selling, but what they believe they're buying. That is true whether you want it to be or not. And it's true no matter what you sell. Even if it's one of those amazing, handy-dandy, super knives that can saw through a suspension bridge and still do delicate radial keratotomy eye surgery. Simply put, the primary role of an integrated brand communications plan should be to align what you say and what you sell with what your audience wants to buy and hear about, without all the belching.

Gordon Hochhalter is a partner at Mobium Creative Group in Chicago. He can be reached at 312-527-0500.