Many years ago, Disney released a film called “Freaky Friday” in which a mother and her daughter end up switching bodies. In the last few years, I’ve noticed a similar trend happening in how B2B and B2C brands approach their marketing. While I’ve always believed both marketing sects are more alike than different (though there are certainly unique qualities to each), it’s particularly interesting lately to see how much the roles have reversed.
B2B brands are taking on more B2C characteristics in the way they create and build stories around the human buyers and influencers that contribute to the final purchasing decision. Conversely, B2C brands are focusing more on building trust and credibility in the face of increased customer scrutiny (and social platforms primed for cacophonic outrage at the slightest perceived misstep.)
Jonathan Beamer, chief marketing officer of the jobs portal Monster, says, “There are differences in B2B and B2C marketing, but also many similarities. There’s always a human on the other side of a transaction who is making decisions. There is still a fun mixture of rational and irrational decision-making.”
In an article published earlier this year in The Drum, Samuel Scott offers, “The Cold War in marketing is the logical result of the longstanding assumptions about B2C and B2B marcom . The main one is that B2C is emotional and has short sales cycles while B2B is logical with long sales cycles. This has led B2C marketers to favor offline advertising and B2B ones to prioritize online informational ‘content’. But that divide need not always occur – especially since it can harm overall results.”
Take this example from Domo, a business intelligence software company that competes with Tableau and Power BI. They’ve built an entire campaign around ‘The Seven Deadly Sins in Business Intelligence’ that looks neither […]
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