Editorial
The Gist
- Aim for memorability. Being memorable is crucial in B2B marketing to make the Day One list of vendors.
- Fame boosts trust. Fame and familiarity together can improve trust and brand preference.
- Fame guides strategy. Ask if marketing efforts will make your brand more famous in your market.
If you were to simplify everything you should be doing with your B2B marketing strategies, what would you end up with? Two words: "get famous."
Top Goal in B2B Marketing Strategies: Be Memorable
In marketing, this is less about celebrity than memorability. The primary goal is to be front of mind when buyers are shortlisting vendors. This doesn’t happen very often in the world of B2B marketing strategies. Investing six-figure sums in software or switching accountancy firms is hugely disruptive and often high risk. So it’s a marketer’s job to make sure their company makes the cut when a buyer thinks about making a change.
Related Article: Mastering B2B Marketing Strategies in a Digital Age
Google Rebrands AI Chatbot to Gemini
Last month, Google rebranded its AI chatbot. If you didn’t know it used to be called Bard, you’d be forgiven. In any case, it’s now called Gemini.
Why did Google do this? Well, I say generative AI chatbot, you say… ChatGPT. And therein lies the problem. Google, a pioneer in AI, had been relegated to the bench by OpenAI’s perfectly timed launch that took AI mainstream in what seemed like a matter of moments.
Wired reported that Google had conducted blind tests with users of Gemini and other leading chatbots and found the Google offering to be “the most preferred chatbot.”
This takes me back to the time Pepsi regularly beat Coke in blind taste tests. We all know which brand continues to lead today.
Winning in Marketing: Be Memorable, Not Just Best
The reality is that, if you want to win at marketing, being the best at what you do doesn’t matter as much as being memorable. Today, having a superb product or service is the price of entry. Social media and online reviews tend to kill off the bad apples before they can grow to any critical mass.
Google knows this only too well. The fact that we talk about Googling something rather than Binging it shows the power of being the first brand to come to mind for users. It’s why Google pays billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on various browsers.
Related Article: Brand Differentiation: What's It Look Like in B2B Marketing?
90% of Sales Go to Day One List Brands
Research — incidentally by Google, as well as Bain & Company — of 1,208 people at US companies involved in buying software, cloud hosting, hardware, telecommunications, logistics, marketing and industrial equipment, revealed that a staggering 90% of sales go to brands that feature on buyers’ Day One lists of vendors. By Day One, they mean the brands buyers already know.
Day One lists involve little-to-no research. They comprise vendors that are already widely known, who can be readily named from memory, and are therefore deemed to be the safest choice. As a species, we tend to think the things we can easily remember are intrinsically more valuable than those we struggle to recall (this is also called the availability heuristic).
This is why marketers must do everything they can to become famous in their categories, niches or sectors — to tap into the limited mental availability of buyers.
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When a potential buyer thinks about an issue in your category, they should immediately think: Of course there’s [your brand], they’re worth considering.
Related Article: Quality Over Quantity: Why Personalized Marketing Strategies Are the Future
How to 'Get Famous'
Assuming you’re already offering a top-quality product or service, how do you get famous?
The brutal reality is that it probably doesn't matter too much what you're famous for, as long as it is generally positive.
Some different ways you can be famous in your category:
- Get famous for how you treat customers.
- Get famous for your viewpoint on the industry.
- Get famous for who you won’t work with.
- Get famous for that weird character you use in all your comms.
- Get famous for choosing orange in a sea of navy blue.
- Get famous for how you talk.
- Get famous for using hand-drawn illustrations instead of tired stock photos or obviously-AI-generated images.
- Get famous for being emotional when everyone else is robotically rational.
- Get famous for plain speaking where industry jargon dominates.
The list goes on.
Related Article: 4 Marketing Strategies for Riding Out a Consumer Recession
Fame and Familiarity: A Winning Marketing Combo
But is it enough to be famous, when you can simply be familiar?
Marketers who work in risk-averse industries like insurance, or certain professional services, will know that convincing higher ups to go against the grain is rather like pulling teeth. Said many a CEO to a director of marketing: “Why would we want to stand out when we can fit in and be seen as a safe pair of hands?”
Research in 2023 by Newsworks suggests fame and familiarity can work in tandem to improve trust. It ties the concept of brand fame to social proof — the notion that if others are seen to value the brand then it is tried and tested. It states that fame can work alongside familiarity, which is accrued over time, giving confidence in the brand and helping increase buyer trust.
The fame strategy also makes judging your B2B marketing strategies a whole heap simpler. For anything you plan to do, you can ask: Will this make us more famous in our market?
If not, think hard about whether you should be doing it at all.
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