B2B's golden age is now

Speaker A: Welcome to B2B needs Don Draper, brought to you by TRU. For too long, B2B has lacked creativity and inspiration, leading to alarming declines in effectiveness and marketing departments being slowly devalued more and more within their organizations. We're here to change that by getting under the skin of what it really means to be a highly effective B2B marketer. We'll be speaking to some of the brightest minds in the industry to discuss. Discuss what they're doing to be a bit more, well, Don Draper. Now to our host, Nathan Anibaba.

Speaker B: Welcome back to B2B NIEs, Don Draper, the show that puts the martini back in the marketing. We've got two special guests for our show today. First up, we have John Watton, VP of marketing at uh, VMware and a veteran in blending data driven approaches with brand storytelling. He's got over 25 years in the industry with a strong focus on sustainability. John brings a wealth of knowledge about navigating and evolving the landscape of B2B marketing. John is joined by Richard Parsons, our own co founder at Tru, uh, one of the brainchilds behind this podcast, B2B needs Don Draper. We are one of the leading Creative and Media B2B agencies in the country. Richard has over 30 years of advertising and marketing experience, from startups to blue chip giants like Adobe, Cisco, Oracle and many others. So, John and Richard, welcome to B2B needs Don Draper.

Speaker C: Thanks, Nathan.

Speaker D: Um, thanks, Nathan. It's great to be here.

Speaker B: So, first off, classic question that we ask all of our guests. Richard, I'll start with you. What does being a bit more Don Draper mean to you?

Speaker C: Uh, it means, uh, bringing humanity into the world of communications. He was doing it in the 50s and 60s and 70s when he needed to bring humanity into that kind of stuffy old world, uh, of conservatism. But I think in B2B we need to, uh, do the same, but take a little bit of the corporateness out of some of our communications.

Speaker B: John, same question to you.

Speaker D: I would agree. Um, I've said now for a while that, um, you know, one of the, one of the opportunities we have now in B2B is to, is to learn from some of those practices and blend it with everything that we'd be doing in the intervening period. But the job almost that we have to do now in the digital world is exactly the same as in the 60s where they were trying to, um, ah, get a box of soap powder to jump off the supermarket shelf to a housewife. We have to do the same now with enterprise software in an email feed or a digital feed or a social feed. So to echo um, Richard's points, it is about doing that through standout um, design creative and also giving it that human element. So uh, that's what it means to me as well.

Speaker B: So we're going to jump around a little bit today. We're going to touch on a number of different topics. I'm really excited about where the conversation will go. But let's start the conversation by talking about a topic that we ended our last chat with Netflix. Well specifically the Canada principle, um, which is all about for those that don't know, starting in a smaller, more manageable market, refining your product or service and then selling, scaling up before you're able so that you can get product market fit. How has that principle John played into your role and your career and your decision making process as a marketer?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean I think, I mean I've worked at a range of uh, companies big and small. So you know I'm at VMware, that's a 35,000 person company, multibillion um, dollar operation. I've worked at more startup and uh, smaller uh, solo businesses. And the fallacy of marketing is that everything will be solved by uh, people and budget. Now don't get me wrong, I'm always happy for more people and budget wherever I've been. But I've been at VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and I've been at small 200 person companies and I've had lots of resources and not much resources and that's not the problem. And how I apply the Canada principle to the way I've seen my career is the challenge of marketing is prioritization. It's only prioritization. Layering more money and people just makes the problem more complex. Now there are points when those things help. So the candidate principle for me is I've always applied is really understanding what the priority for marketing is based on business objectives and where we can create most impact. There's so much we can do. There's no doubt that we can cover so many bases but where do we start with that clear single idea and build from there. So that idea of like taking uh, product market fit in a smaller market I would apply to customer cohorts, solutions um, where we, where we focus in terms of the funnel, um, you know, which customers, what types of activities, physical, digital channels. So I would apply it across the board and I think that's, that's been a guiding principle for me in my career over the last uh, 25 or so years.

Speaker B: I think that question of prioritization comes up time and time again, both in your personal life and in business. It's all about a question of resources and where do you prioritize your efforts. Richard, how has this applied to your life and your career?

Speaker C: I don't always think that it's to do with priorities. I think it's to do with um, boiling things down. I once heard this story of this Indian guy who carved these beautiful elephants out of ugly lumps of wood. Um, people said, well, how do you do it? He said, well, I just carve away the bits that don't look like the elephant and you end up with these kind of like these beautiful crafted things. I think that that's the thing is about boiling everything down to not of course they become your priorities, but they become your essence. What is the thing? I was in a meeting just uh, this week with a company very complicated, a big brand that works in the financial space. I was with them this week and they said, look, how do we go to market with a single minded proposition? How do we take one thing to market when we've got so many, we've got 140 products, we've got all these different solution levels. And I just kept reminding, well, you just come up to 2,000ft, look back down your organization and you find the one thing. And they kept saying, but we don't have one thing, we can't be one thing. We've got all these solutions. And they said, no, you can be one thing that's in the mind of the consumer, the business consumer. Um, for them I gave an example of giving these people control that actually worked across all of the areas. Control is quite a powerful emotion. So yeah, finding your place, finding your market position, um, it was something that sort of started to come out in the 80s, that sort of thinking. And I think that corporations just don't do it very well.

Speaker D: Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it Richard? Because I think, uh, um, what I love about what we're doing now is there's many different strategies and tactics we can apply, much so than ever before. But some of those basics still apply, right? As you say, some of those principles that maybe I wouldn't say that we've forgotten, but in the rush to chase around everything that's going on in this frantic world, we forget some of those kind of principles, you know, those basic principles, right, which you know, often, you know, you can remind, uh, brands of.

Speaker C: I guess I think it's a seniority um, it's a, it's a priority for scene for the senior, senior people. Because what I find is that if we're talking to somebody who's working in marketing ops or digital marketing or something, you know, they are responsible for performance marketing in that particular channel, whatever it might be. Well, they um, aren't the people who are going to be able to make a decision about what the, what the, the priority should be. They'll have a priority for their space maybe, or they'll be able to boil down to the essence of what they're supposed to do. But it does take really, it's a CMO or CEO, cfo, it's a C suite, um, decision on some of these and therefore most. When I say that people have forgotten how to do it or can't do it, I think they just don't have the empowered to do it because of where they sit in the organization. So senior, senior, senior decision, isn't it?

Speaker D: Yeah, I would agree for that.

Speaker B: Yeah. This week I was actually funny you should talk about the importance of priorities and how B2B marketers have forgotten them. I was rereading Positioning this week and obviously that book came out late 80s, uh, early 90s, talking about the importance of creating ladders in the mind as far as sort of, you know, the position that you occupy in the market and the position that you occupy in the minds of your customers, how important it is to, if you're not on level one of that ladder, to create a new ladder and that's a new level of positioning in the mind of your customer. That level of thinking I feel has some of the basic fundamentals and principles of marketing I think have been forgotten in the race to catch up with the latest technology or the latest fad in marketing. Talk about the importance of core principles that we've almost forgotten and how do we get back to some of those fundamentals as B2B marketers?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean talking from my experience, I've worked in software, software businesses, I'm going to say software and technology, but really it's been software. I haven't worked in many hardware businesses. Um, high growth, fast paced. Um, a lot of the focus is on new customer acquisition. Um, I've been lucky enough to work in brands that have been trying to do something different in their space, create a category, all those sorts of things. And I'm sure Richard, you know, has a lot of experience from the agency side helping those brands, you know, build their brand when, when you haven't really got, you know, that, that Sort of basis or reposition yourselves. And so you know these are fast paced environments and the focus is on just getting stuff done and, and moving fast as you can. And uh, you know, I think there's um, you know, in the heat of that it's very much just a can do attitude which is no bad thing and you kind of, you know, you break things and all those sorts of, you know, wonderful cliches that you get in technology kind of uh, businesses. But yes, you know, some of that um, thinking and consideration sometimes is lost and back to Rich's point, requires experienced people to come in and say yes, these are all great tools to help achieve our goals. But let's not forget some of the principles that with some planning and you don't want to over architect planning in these sorts of companies but with some planning then uh, um, we can hook this all together and either prioritize or I love that kind of distill down to the essence of what we need to do in that. So that's why I think first of all it's great for people like me who've been around a bit because that skill is needed and you need to blend that with you know, uh, some of the digital skills, social skills, you know, um, I mean, you know, social media, um, into a marketing team to get stuff done. Um, you know, you have to reinvent yourself all the time but found it in some strong, you know, thinking as well. So uh, so yeah, so definitely, definitely uh, bring it all together is really the, the art for the, for the marketing leader.

Speaker B: Now Richard, what principles have we forgotten in B2B that we need to be reminded of?

Speaker C: The B2B Institute, uh created um, a Ah, Five Principles of Growth document. Uh, anybody can Google it. B2B Institute, Five Principles of Growth. It should be your bible I think as a B2B marketer because it just unwrapped uh, some of the issues that performance marketing, performance marketing taken us down one route and it just said hey, hold a minute, let's just have a look. And they're using a lot of empirical evidence, uh, from uh, a Bennett and field study in conjunction with the I. So lots of really, really good data, ah, that went into some of this analysis. But the five principles of growth were broadly speaking if I can remember them were um, the invest in share of market, uh, sorry, invest in share of voice. Because if you have a 10% increase in your share of voice over your share of market, um, so let's say your share of market is 20% but your share of voice is 30% for a service brand. You will grow 1.8% of the entire market in that year. Just sheer weight of volume of media spend. And that comes from that act research, uh, comes from uh, even though it's in a B2B guide here, it's actually uh, in marketing and it comes from the Ironberg Bass Institute from Australia, uh, from the 70s and just been consistent since then. Um, so just sheer weight of advertising I think Pete, uh, Procter and Gamble and people like that, they live and breathe by that. The weight of their communication is in that space. Uh, the next thing is invest um, in reach. So we're too narrow in the way that we define our audiences. So when you're trawling the market market and you're in that customer acquisition phase then you're typically for a strategic purchase. The thing that makes B2B different from B2C I ah, say is mainly B2C is uh, tactical purchases, whereas B2B are strategic purchases. And that means overall the market buys in a more infrequent phase, uh, an infrequent cadence. So typically you might say the whole of the market buys in let's say a three, four, five year cycle. If it's five years then you can say that 20% are buying in one year and therefore 5% are buying in three months. So if we're running these quarterly campaigns, uh, trawling the market for people in an immediate need, trying to stimulate those people in market, then actually uh, you're forgetting that there's 95%. The thing you should always be thinking about is that there's future demand. It is still an acquisition promise, but it's future demand. And that's what the brand piece is doing. It's building that future demand. Um, so reach, uh, by definition by talking to 100% of your market and having a concept of everybody in your category that might buy in a 5 year cycle should be your target audience. LinkedIn put the figure in terms of churn of employees. Whether that's a horizontal move from someone from sales to HR or whether that's someone from in sales in pharmaceutical and then they're in pharmaceutical uh, then they're in sales. In finance that churn is somewhere between 30 and 40% every year. So in a five year cycle pretty much the whole thing is replenished. So the idea that you're going to have a very narrow definition of targeting when Talking to those 95% of people out of market is ridiculous. You have to be talking to a very Very broad definition of an order. That's why fame campaigns are really important. That's one of the other rules, one, uh, of the other principles. So building fame should be your number one objective. Not sales, acquisition, not even awareness, but building fame, having a preference for your brand, and being so well known that, uh, when someone goes to a dinner party and someone says, who do you work for? And you say the name, they go, wow, that's interesting because they've heard of it. Um, then the other two principles. One is a balance between brand and investment in brand versus acquisition, sales activation. And they put it at somewhere near 50, 50. Other research later on puts brand more at 70 30. So a bias towards brand. And as I said at the beginning, there were five. The final one is emotion. Emotion beats, um, rational communication because you're talking to that 95%. They don't really give a damn about you. They're not in market, they're not listening to you. That you have to have to be talking to different part of their brain to stimulate them to build those ladders that you were referring to there. Nathan. To get that memorability, you need to have an emotional response from the audience. What's the emotional response you want from them? That should also be a focus of your communications, which is where the humanity piece comes in that everybody talks about in B2B but not many people are doing.

Speaker B: You can't see me now, but I'm rubbing my hands because this is where I want to go next. I want to talk about humanity, I want to talk about emotion, and I want to talk about brand building, specifically for software and technology businesses where you spent most of your life, John. But I think the last time that we spoke, you said that pretty much everything in software today is about leads. So we effectively have to demonstrate that we're generating leads consistently enough to feed a hungry sales team and help our organizations grow. However, effective lead gen starts with a strong brand. Explain the connection between brand and lead gen in B2B for those that haven't made that connection.

Speaker D: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean these are very, um, you know, talk about people, you know, having an emotional reaction. I'm sure when people talk about brand, when we talk about brand, people have, you know, a certain categorization of what that means. And I think to what Rich is saying, and the B2B Institute is quite rightly saying, is you need to think holistically about the, uh, you know, the full marketing mix effectively. And when people say brand, from my experience, they think of really just pure advertising. But you know, you've got to think about often the way in which, uh, uh, a prospective customer can first hear about you is not necessarily through an ad or through what you traditionally call a brand campaign. I've seen them.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: Brand campaigns tend to be, you know, advertising it, it's more than that. So you know, people may not first hear of you because of a paid media ad or you know, a poster on somewhere or you know, on, in our world, a uh, poster on the 101 in California or on the A4 in London. Right. So, you know, a big cheap poster site which only a few brands can afford to do anyway. Um, so, um, so yeah, so I don't, you can't, you can't disconnect the two. But what you need to think about is really that, as Richard said, that that kind of um, bias situation in terms of you need to connect with people who are future opportunity. So how do you do that? And there are many different ways you can do that. You also need to connect with people who are in that sort of buying mode and can get value out of what you have to offer in the short to medium term. And then you need to continue that story into those conversations where you're even working with existing customers. I mean, we're typical of a brand, uh, situation that a lot of brands have. We're well known for something. We do much more than that. Right. So even our customers, you know, need some kind of re, um, education around the fuller value of what we have. And from a brand perspective, our kind of offer and our point of view has changed over the last 10, 15 years and we have to work with existing customers on that just as much as people have never heard of us, you know, and we have to do that in a way that creates, you know, an emotional connection that, that, that stands out, as Richard said, for those who are not going to. And we're a very considered purchase. Right? We are, ah, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of, you know, tens of millions of dollars investment. Right. That, that, that's, that's a very considered purchase. Um, but we still have to compete with a very strong market with a lot of competitors and we have to have a differentiated point of view and we have to say it in a way that's interesting, engaging, you know, provocative, whatever it is for people to sort of make the association around, uh, what we have to do. So what I love about where brand has kind of gone isn't the province of a, of a, of an, you know, like an advertising team who sits Separately and runs a brand campaign. It's really everything. I mean we have brand to demand. It infuses everything we do because you need to have a consistent proposition all the way through the conversation with a prospective customer, to a customer who's perhaps interested, to someone who makes an investment in us and then continues to be a customer. And for us in B2B, you know, in the enterprise space, it's also something we need to deliver through not just marketing. So it's through our sales teams so that the offer, the promise that we have, that we're positioning maybe in a uh, marketing communication is fulfilled through the sales teams that then have the conversation and picks it up further down the line. So what I love is, you know, now and we'll talk about, you know, it's bringing all those things together, it's bringing the art and the science together, bringing data, you know, bringing creativity together across that whole thing and thinking more holistically than just kind of siloed programs and campaigns.

Speaker B: How do we practically inject emotion into a category or a business that is a software business, that it's a large, complex technology driven um, considered purchase. These are huge organizations that we're talking about here. I mean VMware, 35,000 people, um, huge organizations. How do you add a human touch to your marketing with the, with such a large and in some ways on the face of it quite an impersonal brand. How do you do that in B2B?

Speaker D: Well first of all we sell a market to humans. Uh, so uh, this is why I think things like uh, um, a brand voice, tone of voice, language, creative, um, imagery are all really important to create. And yes, you're right. I mean when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars investment into sort of core infrastructure that businesses run on, you obviously want to major more on credibility trust, um, because people really are betting their business versus buying a piece of technology to try out maybe uh, some marketing, uh, automation which isn't so critical. We deal in mission critical your technology. So obviously we're going to, you know, we're going to want to convey those values. But you know, I always say that when, you know, no matter what the level of investment is and the scale of your technology, ultimately when you ask customers why did they choose you? You know, it's never just a tick. But yes, you've got to provide the technical capabilities and they want to see a technology roadmap that meets with their vision. But you know, and so you're never going to make the cut unless you meet Some requirements. But also they'll say, you know, you understood my business. Your team really gelled with us. You know, your engineers were just amazing. They're very emotional things, chemistry. You know, we felt that we could partner with you. There is a lot of emotion to it. And my experience is that, uh, customers are not going to choose solutions where they feel that the company they're dealing with is a bunch of whatever, you know, that they want to deal with, people they feel they can trust and work with. And so that's what we need to convey. Now in some brands I've been at, we can then layer on a little bit of, you know, um, uh, extra, you know, maybe being provocative, you know, coming out with slightly more controversial opinions or humor. You know, humor has a great role to play in B2B marketing. People think humor can be frivolous. Often it can be, um, a strong emotion to add again without compromising some of your core values. So that's what I love about everything we do. We need to convey that in not just our brand campaigns, but also what you might call demand campaigns, events, digital, everything we do to really position ourselves as a business. So, um, how we do that, we partner with great agencies like yours, we work with our executive team. You have to have strong marketing leadership and then you work on a whole, um, advocacy program within the business and so on. But it does require leadership to drive this and a strong belief. And of course we can test things, we can try things, we can prove things out. So now we don't have to bet our business on a Super bowl ad and spend all our budget. We can try things out with some digital stuff, a B testing, multivariate testing, and so on. So we can also come back and back to your Canada principle. We can start small, prove it out, and then come back to the business and say, yeah, this is working, we get a better response, better engagement, we're getting better share of voice, whatever it is, and then we can start to roll that out. Um, so that's, I think, also another way in which, uh, we can make it happen.

Speaker C: And Nathan, um, you talked a little bit a minute ago about sales. Um, start with brand. But actually, um, if the idea that you could only build a brand through big bucks advertising is the only way of doing that, then it would be that no startup could ever make a sale. Ah, so it can't be true because a startup doesn't have a brand from an advertising point of view, but it still can make a sale. Uh, so how does that make its first sale? What I would say is that there's a symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing. And in that instance it's your salesperson who's making uh, that initial sale. They're imparting some of your brand values, they're imparting some of your brand message. They say why you're different. Um, what advertising does is it just puts it on scale. It's just as your audience moves from being an audience of one to an audience of millions, then you need to have a way of doing that and advertising is a way of doing that. But because it's uh, an expensive approach, you need to boil it down to single minded propositions. Whereas with your salespeople they can be very variable. So they can be listening to the audience and saying what are they buying? What do they need? And then they can tell the story associated with what that buyer wants to buy. Um, so they're very adaptable. Uh, and that's a slight difference. I think somewhere in between. Sometimes PR sits in the middle of telling brand stories because it can tell lots and lots and lots of stories, tell a thousand stories in a year. Whereas your advertising probably needs to be just one, um, maybe two, three if you've got a few different audiences. But um, yeah. So I think this idea of brand isn't connected to advertising as John was saying, but it is connected to um, what is this essence that we were talking about a minute ago? What is the reason why you exist if you didn't exist tomorrow? Why would anyone care?

Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. And just building on Richard, what you were saying there, someone has to be the first to buy your product or service. I know from my experience working in sort of market entrant companies. I remember that Ariba, uh, the procurement software company is now part of SAP. But I was there 20 years ago and we were building the market for uh, E procurement as it was then and it changed names and so on. But we basically had a sales playbook that said try to enter a country or an industry, win one account, you know, deliver you know, your brand proposition individually to that account through our sales team and then we would use that, that account then to win the next one and the next one and the next one. So it was kind of a brand approach done through a sales playbook and then then building out and scaling it and then you can start to bring, you know, some of your more breadth, you know, programs into place. As you say, back then PR probably had a bigger role to play because the media was more powerful. Uh, it's not Quite the case now. Uh, and then you would look at your marketing programs and your brand programs and so on. But yeah, I would echo that. You can start with the sales team winning that first customer.

Speaker B: The canvas that we have in B2B now to tell stories has never been. I think we have a much bigger canvas, uh, with which to paint. It used to be that we only had email and a limited number of channels that has expanded significantly in B2B over recent years. Richard, maybe tell us a little bit about some of the channels that you're really excited about, which can help brand marketers in B2B tell their amazing stories.

Speaker C: There isn't a channel that exists in B2C that we can't use in B2B. Um, obviously if you take something like, uh, TV, then obviously you would expect to be spending serious bucks on a TV campaign. But actually, um, in the uk, we're very lucky across Europe as well, but also increasingly in the States. Um, so in the UK we've got Sky AdSmart, but we got Connected TV. I know that I watch YouTube, uh, on my TV these days. And, uh, I know that that's a huge thing that's in the States that people are watching. I know that YouTube have a streaming service there. So that's partly why. But, um, we're effect have access to TV, um, and I think that as B2B marketers, we would sometimes see TV or cinema as being maybe the pinnacle of traditional media like Big Canvas. Thinking when you go to the cinema and you watch those ads there, ah, I foresee a future when, uh, you'll be able to buy, uh, those cinema ads programmatically, which means that you'll be buying based on your audiences and your audiences will be niche because B2B audiences are niche. And you'll be able to target, um, those, uh, channels towards your audiences, wherever they are.

Speaker D: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, uh, you know, everything I think is, is in play now for B2B. That, that was in B2C. You don't need necessarily the huge, huge budgets. You can be judicious, you can be targeted. You can only appear to, you know, the, the audiences you want to appear to. So you don't need to buy these kind of breadth bookings. I mean, Formula one is a great example. If you watch Formula one, it's like looking at an IT trade show, right? Because every IT company is sponsoring some part of a car, has got ads on the course, you know, VMware included. Right. We're one of the sponsors of McLaren. And you know that years ago was well, I guess the province of cigarettes, uh, and drinks companies and they're not allowed to advertise anymore on Formula one. But you know, the cot, the cost is much more um, um, you know, within the reach of B2B. And I think that's been the wonderfully liberating thing about B2B marketing over the last few years is that, you know, the cost of the technology, the ability to do things, the investment that you need has really sort of brought it more into mid size and even small businesses. I mean I was in 150 person company and we were one of the first, you know, 13 years ago or so to invest in um, marketing automation. And at that time prior to that you had to have huge budgets, huge CRM systems, systems integrators and it wasn't something that a small company could do. And now you can punch above your weight. So as you say the canvas is much broader. It then comes back to some first principles of understanding who you want to target, what you want to achieve and then use the right channels in the right mix to get to those objectives. But yeah, I think that that's really interesting and at the same time what I encourage with my teams as well is, you know, is try things out as well. I mean, you know, try out some of these channels. You know, if they don't work then we don't have to spend a lot and it's quite interesting to find out and we can experience them in our own lives. Right. So you know, I don't know if TikTok's the right thing for VMware or you know, or whatever, but why don't we try it? You know, we've had some success with, with Instagram. We have great connection on other platforms. They're also in our personal lives. So as individuals our marketers can try uh, these things out themselves and bring them into our uh, uh, business, uh, operations.

Speaker B: So much of our approach to growth for B2B brands comes down to who's in the hot seat as cmo, uh, whether you are more of a revenue focused marketer or more of a brand builder. I think we've said in our last conversation that we've seen a shift or you've seen a shift in the types of CMOs, uh, who are leading growth within uh, B2B brands from being revenue marketers to being more sort of having more of a creative background. Why has that shift taken place? What do you think is happening and what do you think the implications are for B2B brands.

Speaker D: Well, I would say that the sort of, of um, the jurious split between, you know, what type of marketer makes the right CMO in my industry.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: I'm talking again about software technology, you know, uh, B2B. I know a lot of debate in our industry has been around the revenue market, as you said. It's been around how does marketing contribute to generating pipeline? Because we're in B2B and in growth businesses the focus is really on with the sales organization to bring in business and they look to marketing to help in that. And of course that's a very nuanced and multivariate answer to how marketing helps generate pipeline. And I think everything we discussed is in the mix to do that. It's not just direct response, uh, send out an email, invite people to an event and then create a lead and some one business. It doesn't work like that as we know. Um, but what I've seen is despite all that conversation around revenue marketing pipeline and so on, a lot of the CMOs that are coming into the software industry or being put in those positions are more on the brand communications messaging side, which I think says for some brands they're looking to marketing to help them define that market position, to define that differentiated point of view, to cut through, you know, to, I hate using the word awareness. I can't remember Richard, what you, how you described it, but build that awareness of the brand and get the name known right, so that, you know, so that your share of voice is much stronger than it is. And I think, you know, some ways that's a recognition that um, it's a very multifaceted thing. It doesn't mean that the revenue side of things is not important. Of course, you know, every marketer is a T shaped marketer. You, you have depth in a certain discipline and then you need to understand, you know, everything around you. So you know, those brand marketers, let's say, who are very strong on maybe thinking about the creative messaging positioning, know that they need to surround themselves with revenue marketers and other marketers and the, you know, the good leaders always surround themselves with, with experts who can help them with the things that they're not strong in. But it, you know, but I think I see very few revenue oriented CMOs, although it's a key part of the KPI, uh, of the department and much more an indication that a lot of what we're talking about is really important to the CEO and the other leaders in the business. And that's what they look to marketers For Richard, I don't know what you, you've kind of seen in your experience.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, in my experience I think that it's not just B2B. I think the marketing industry, um, has all moved from what used to be brand. And I think it was because we used to have uh, those big canvas. You know, we used to be the outlets were TV and your outlets were the double page spread. Whether that was in newspapers or whether that was in the Trade Press. For B2B, it moved from that world where that was the expected or the channel to market that everyone would use to digital. And then suddenly we lost that canvas and everything went smaller. The Internet in its first instance didn't have any of those. I remember briefing into a creative director once, um, to do an ad and it was that the ad was a static ad the size of a postage stamp. And he said, what? You do an idea in there? It was sort of ridiculous. Um, and then I think that we've had the waves after wave of technology and technology companies got big deep pockets. So, uh, it wasn't so long ago that inbound marketing from HubSpot was the answer to. And advertising was dead. And now when you look at it, HubSpot, um, only a few years ago HubSpot started to have plugins that were advertising plugins for HubSpot. And you sort of start seeing, no, actually the programmatic world is opening up traditional media but bought in a digital way. Um, and I think that the pendulum is swinging from performance marketer back to brand marketer or maybe a spread. We need to have all of those things. But because there has been a overwhelming focus on that performance marketing for 20, 25, even 30 years, I think that we've got a whole generation of new marketer that is too focused on performance and has never had to do an idea, has never had to create something that is single minded in its nature. So that's why you end up with this very, I call it a PR approach which is just a lot of content. It doesn't have to be pr. It can be um, content like a white paper for example, or a webinar or uh, another case study or a lot of that type of content. But it's very kind of, you're not sitting down and boiling down to an essence. You're saying what are the range of stories that we can tell here? And hopefully they ladder up to something that maybe that's the best that you can hope there. But um, yeah, I think it's a generational issue and I think that marketers are going to have to learn a lot of skills. But I think that's true in B2C as much as it is in B2B.

Speaker B: We've covered a lot of ground today, guys. Just bringing the conversation towards an end. How would you categorize kind of where we are in B2B marketing right now? And actually more specifically, why do you think now is the best time to be in B2B marketing? I find it ironic I'm asking two B2B marketers, uh, that question. Of course you go to say that it's a fantastic time to be in B2B marketing right now, but Richard, John, outline your case. John, uh, I'll start with you.

Speaker D: Well, you know, maybe not as profession. So the way I think about it, you know, there's never been a better time to be in B2B marketing. I have no rose tinted spectacle about the last 25, 30 years of marketing. I think this is the best time and it will only get better. There was no golden age of B2B marketing. You know, there was no halcyon years. There was no don Draper, uh, B2B in the 90s. Wasn't it also cool and suave and sophisticated? It wasn't. It was crude and basic and we did the best what we had. And hey, you know, we did amazing things and we continue amazing things. So my point of view is, you know, it's not like, hey, come to B2B Marketing. It's an amazing time. It's like, this is the best time if you're a B2B marketer, you know, we have the most ability and why do I say that? All of the topics that come into marketing across B2C and B2B technology, creative, brand, you know, uh, customer experience, everything exists here and it's in play now. Company to company on my side, client side, you know, different companies, views kind of differ. So some companies, they have a more broader view, some they have a much narrower view. But as a profession, I think this is the best time. It's mixing art and science. It's thinking about the entire customer experience. It's thinking about, not just about lead generation, it's thinking about engagement, relationship. Yes. Revenue retention. It's a much, uh, bigger, uh, ah, um, you know, playing, um, field to play in. The only thing I would say is if I would categorize one opportunity we have is to move us away from the promotional side of marketing. Uh, most marketing is not around defining the product, the pricing. You know, it's typically and maybe not the core proposition, but definitely the marketing proposition. I think that's an opportunity that we have in B2B, that maybe in B2C marketing is more leading that process. But aside from that, it's never been a better time.

Speaker B: That has got me fired up, John. Richard, I don't know how you follow that.

Speaker C: Well, I think we've covered off so many things in today's conversation, but that canvas, that's, uh, a serious opportunity for us. Most of the evolution in marketing is in the channels we use, not necessarily in the messaging. Some of those things are baked in. Our evolution goes back. If you took a child from, uh, 70,000 years ago, put them through the modern education system, they probably look very similar to you and I. Humans aren't changing at such a fast pace. Technology, on the other hand, is. And channels, and those things are moving really at a fast pace. That's really where a lot of excitement, I think, is in our industry. That opens up the canvas. That opens up the opportunity of telling those stories. But I concur with John. I think, um, that the day that CMOs really sit on the top table and are responsible for the four Ps of marketing, then that would be proper, uh, Utopia. And I think that would be, uh, a really exciting time.

Speaker B: Great place to end. John and Richard, thank you very much for being on the show.

Speaker D: It's been a pleasure.

Speaker C: I loved it. Thank you.

Speaker B: I'm Nathan Alibaba. See you next time on B2B needs. Don Draper.

Speaker A: Find out more at Ah, True Explanation agency. Com Podcast.