B2B Advertising:
Why advertising
works so poorly
in the B2B sector

Competitive business-to-business advertising... or simply creativity gone bonkers?

Advertising is always expensive. Yet for anyone selling business-to-business, advertising is seldom results-producing, let alone cost-effective.

In fact, many executives consider advertising in the B2B sector complete waste of money.

And so it is that advertising was originally created for the consumer market, drumming up demand for goods offered at retail outlets.

The consumer markets are still by far the biggest area of advertising, by a wide margin. The advertising budget of single multinational food industry giant totally dwarfs the advertising costs of the B2B sector.

And it makes sense to spend money advertising to consumers.

With products that are factually identical and with the supply greatly exceeding the demand... what else could they do to generate sales than create "a unique identity" to their products so people choose theirs from the shelf?

But in the B2B sector, it's a different ball game. Products and services contain GENUINE uniqueness. Companies often have different solutions to problems and their products and/or services are NOT identical.

And target groups are much smaller... and certainly not impressed by the lowbrow logic of consumer advertising.

Advertising & B2B: Exorbitant costs mainly for entertainment value?

The differences between the business-to-business and consumer markets are many. In terms of advertising, the significant dissimilarities come into play when we consider the UNIQUENESS of what's being sold and the TARGETING of potential buyers.

Of course, one can always generalise, claiming that products and services offered by the business-to-business sector are identical.

"When you've seen one, you've seen them all..." is however not true.

Nowhere can such a diversity of innovation be found than what we have in the B2B sector.

In contradiction, the consumer-sector abounds with identical products and services. For an obsessed connoisseur, there may be distinct differences between chocolate bars of various manufacturers... but for most of us, one chocolate bar is much like another.

And because chocolate is chocolate is chocolate... the majority of consumers do not really possess the expertise to evaluate and compare the quality, nutritional values, taste and substance, ingredients and their effects on health, and other such issues. (And the manufactures may not want them to look into those things either.)

The only way you can make them buy YOUR chocolate bar is by advertising — using music, fashionable clothes and accessories, models, celebrities... a whole host of "in things" which impress upon the viewers that "Choco bar X is really BLING, man..."

...and then POUND this message home via the media to such extent that it essentially hypnotises the more impressionable portion of the populace into replacing "chocolate" with "Choco bar X" so they buy it when they want (think of) chocolate.

Hence the commonly used vocabulary acquires new words continually. A tissue as become "a kleenex" and a vacuum cleaner "a hoover" and so on.

Consumer advertising is for the masses, creatively devised for the average member of the target group, whose ability to evaluate incoming information would not impress the B2B buyer.

This said just in case you've sometimes wondered how on earth ANYONE would be persuaded by the neanderthal-level symbolism, which is basically the level at which so many consumer ads appear to go for...

You're not in their target group. The message has been carefully created to appeal to those who are.

And that's all well and fine... but it only works when advertising to the CONSUMER market.

You simply couldn't afford such continuous coverage in the media. But more to the point, it would not work even if you could...

Consumer advertising versus B2B — the hypnotic versus the rational

If we cut through the jabbering and symbolism, the ideology of consumer advertising becomes very clear.

The idea is that the vendor — the seller of the merchandise or his representative, the advertising agency — decides what he wants the crowd to believe and then invests millions (and often billions) in achieving that effect.

The message is very brief, as in "Choco Bar X is BLING!" Consumer advertising also comes with more subtle visual messaging, all of which support the main message: "If you want to be cool, eat Choco X Bars so others see it and admire you..." or something equally unthinking.

They're not selling to a professional buyer, obviously. Go try impressing an engineer of a hydraulics manufacturing plant that he should be "Sealant Groovy" because then everyone will admire him for being really, really cool...

You get the idea.

The B2B sector consists of professional buyers. These are experts who buy for the company, not for themselves as consumers. Thus, different logic applies.

Here, THEY must be allowed to make the decision what they want... and we must then PROVIDE that.

Any advertising that attempts to "do a consumer" on the professional B2B buyer will fail.

They are professionals and they instinctively know when someone is trying to best their power of choice. Idiotic reasoning will definitely also insult their intelligence.

And that's the big difference between consumer and B2B advertising:

You cannot overwhelm the decision of the B2B buyer although that's what happens in consumer advertising all the time. And you can't use moronic logic to back your claims for these are thinking clients who cannot be "hypnotized."

You must provide what THEY WANT. Not only in technical terms, though... which is where we come into the power of clever advertising.

B2B advertising: How emotional responses influence our decision-making process

The B2B market consists of experts. These people are professionals.

And yet, they can't escape the fact that they're also HUMAN.

Being human, they're subject to the same laws of life as the rest of us.

Thus, they're influenced by EMOTIONS to a far greater degree than they believe. Certainly, they behave logically. Of course they aim to make their decisions based on careful evaluation of the actual facts and nothing else.

So you can't sell anti wrinkle cream to them by showing how a 20-year-old fashion model has no wrinkles.

It has to be a message that makes sense, something that's LOGICAL.

But by the same token, they are susceptible to emotional influences. Only here's the big and important difference to consumer advertising:

You cannot claim anything that's not true.

By contrast, consumer advertising isn't concerned about the truth, only about legal liability. So when they screen their messages carefully it's only for avoiding huge torts and class suite litigation, not to ensure there are no untruths in their message per se.

You need not look further than the advertising itself.

A thinking person would never believe that you can lose weight by adding a chocolate bar into your diet just because it's low(ish) on calories.

And who is so gullible as to believe that aging can be reversed by "research of the (cosmetic manufacturer's own) dermatological laboratory?"

Well, SOMEONE must accept those data with some degree of truth value since otherwise these industries would hardly pour millions into their campaigns.

But the specific quality of consumer advertising is that the acceptance of "goofy, illogical information" is relatively high among the target group... whereas in B2B it is not the case.

And yet those professional buyers and B2B decision-makers ARE susceptible to emotional advertising. There is a way to tailor your message to your clients so that those hidden emotional responses work in your favour.

Only it's done not through deciding what they should believe... but by finding out from the target group.

B2B advertising: Finding out what your target group decision-makers really want

The business customer won't buy unless YOU know exactly what he wants and needs... both sides of the coin.

Let me explain.

Of course, you need to have the expertise required to provide exactly the solution that's tailored to his technical needs and wishes.

But BEFORE that, you need to know how HE defines his needs and wishes... and start from that reality, working it toward the objective truth of what he needs technically.

You can't just bypass this point. HE needs to feel that HE stays in control of the whole process. You cannot override his volitional control over his own life and responsibilities.

Thus, what HE wants is what HE THINKS he wants at this point... and you need to know what that is BEFORE you can offer it to him (so you can then start working it toward what YOU know he needs).

The only way you can KNOW what he wants is if you've found out before offering it to him.

Guessing won't do the job because there are a million ways to guess wrong. You might be a fraction of an inch away from the "go button" — the hot item that triggers the impulse — and yet miss the sale by the proverbial mile.

In B2B advertising (regardless of whether it's Internet advertising, direct mail marketing, email marketing, corporate branding or even web design), you need to hit smack on target to get a sale.

And you do, every time you achieve a sale... only do you know WHY you got it, what exact thing you said that triggered the positive decision... and which of these things was individual to this client and which generic to the target group?

B2B market research — a survey will do the trick every time!

Before you advertise or invest a penny in any form of promotional publication or marketing, it is advisable to commission a survey so you'll know exactly what your target group truly wants... down to the precise words and phrases they use when speaking of it.

Marketing research is so vital because the B2B buyer cannot be "hypnotized" into accepting that he needs what the VENDOR thinks that he needs.

The professional buyer or business decision maker will only respond to what HE or she wants.

But here's the catch: Even highly educated professionals don't actually KNOW what they want all that well.

Let me explain.

The human thinking process is more prone to rejecting the unwanted, unsuitable, ununderstandable rather than defining what IS wanted, suitable and how it should be explained to be understandable.

In a sense, it's much like the relationship between a doctor and the patient. The doctor diagnoses the patient, finds an affliction and orders the needed medication. The patient knows NOT what's wrong with him and hasn't the expertise to diagnose himself... but if the doctor is right then the medication works.

It works regardless of whether or not the patient understands how it works or what it does.

And so it is with a tailored message whose every component has been devised to mirror what the target person wants.

It positions you on his side, disliking what he deplores, appreciating what he cherishes, using the words and concepts which HE uses, seeing the problem (for which your product or service provides the solution) expressly the same way he does right down to the smallest detail... and so on.

It's the same phenomenon that gets us attracted to a person of the opposite sex.

If someone is exactly on the same wave length with you, likes the same things you do and is equally passionate about the things that are wrong in the world... if that person appears to know what you want and understands your needs...

If you've met that person then chances are that you two kept company for a good long time.

And what is the formation of a client-relationship other than that, in the final analysis (and assuming you're targeting decision-makers who need your products and/or services)?

Like it or not, even the most scientific minds allow the FEELING of the thing to enter into their decision making process as an important factor.

If it FEELS so right then they will rather buy from you that someone else, provided your product or service is compatible and competitive in its quality and offers value for money.

It's not just a personal thing.

The same survey-researched process is used in presenting the technical aspects of your product and/or service. It's easy to present it right when you KNOW what the customer wants, likes, dislikes and so on.

Compare this scientific, effective and risk-free approach to a potential client to the all-too-common idea of pushing one's own ideas on a prospective B2B buyer.

The latter is the popular thing... but it's also the reason for the "yo-yo phenomenon" in building a customer relationship. Some points hit home... but then others don't... and when that occurs, you're basically taking two BACK STEPS in the process of building mutual trust and understanding.

And that's not going to happen if you KNOW what your target group truly wants and likes!

Interested to find out about your B2B advertising?

If you're interested in finding out how your advertising and promotional materials work for your target group, please read the presentation of our Marketing Analysis introductory service which could offer a lot more insight into advertising and marketing your products and/or services.

If web site presentation is important to you, click here to read about our Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization Analysis.

I hope this article has helped you to view advertising differently in terms of its requirement for the business-to-business sector!

Best wishes,

Harry Kafka
HDK Consultants Ltd
32 Manning Close
Richmond Square
East Grinstead RH19 2DR
West Sussex, United Kingdom
Tel. 01342-328 116
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