Business = boring? 

The term business-to-business doesn’t exactly instil excitement within audiences. ‘Business’ generally refers to ‘work’, while some of us love our work, it’s not the most emotionally charged aspect of our lives. It doesn’t share the same part of our hearts as: relationships, culture or entertainment. The general public rarely likes to think about business, outside of the business world that is. However, when you think about it ‘business’ is a world where things change at pace and the need to pivot our direction and ideas in an evolving agile fashion is more important than ever. Just to be able to track with the competition - to be seen as business innovators, it is another level completely, we need to be pushing the boundaries every day with no guidance other than our values and self-belief. 

When brands go on this journey it can create real impact for their branding. Our client, Life Fitness/Hammer Strength, has been looking inwards and backwards to rediscover its legacy and rebuild confidence from its history, whilst moving forward by creating products, and validating it all with clear and confident brand positioning. Does this still sound boring?  

Lessons from the past 

Historically, business-to-business meant we delivered highly specialised and detailed tech-focused communications - we were interested in the quantitative only. What this led to was an incredible amount of carbon copy marketing that was focused on delivering the technical specifications and/or how they would benefit the customer financially. This means that the only thing you can leverage in your marcoms is the ‘product detail’ and the ‘number’. Let’s face it, do either of these things allow you to give a clear advantage through marketing? The answer is: not really. This type of marketing relies entirely on the product and therefore realistically can only achieve as highly as the product itself.  

So what do we need to do?

We need to start focussing on the story and tap into the emotion while being supported by the technical.  

B2B brands need to avoid getting lost in technical jargon and product specs. Turning to storytelling helps to humanise the brand, B2B consumers should relate to a brand and its offerings, in the same way B2C consumers do. By focusing on the people behind the company, B2B marketers can create a narrative that nurtures trust, builds relationships, and makes the brand feel more approachable.

Even in the B2B world, a well-told story resonates emotionally, creating a sense of connection between the brand and the potential customer.

“Business customers are consumers too”

This simple statement when we first heard it was a genuine lightbulb moment for us. In recent years, B2B buyers have come to expect the same level of personalised, engaging, and consumer-centric experiences that they encounter as a B2C consumer. B2B marketing can learn from B2C strategies to create more impactful campaigns, build stronger relationships, and drive better results. Transforming B2B marketing, making it more effective and compelling.

In B2C marketing, the consumer is always at the centre of the strategy. Brands build their campaigns around what their consumer wants, needs, and values. They deep dive into who their consumer is. Similarly, B2B marketing should adopt a consumer-first mindset, focusing on understanding buyer needs and providing solutions that matter most to them.

For instance, Life Fitness/Hammer Strength, a B2B focused company for its sales channels, has customers that work in the fitness industry themselves, use the equipment, and be very keen fitness enthusiasts in their own right. This thought inspired us to reassess the previous ‘tech-focused’ mindset and pivot the direction to narrative and emotionally charged creative executions that would instil excitement with customers and attract an audience through the lens of the consumer while validating this ‘attract’ content through the more familiar quantitative ‘engage’ comms to drive conversion. By taking this approach, we move the company from B2B only, into B2B2C - injecting feeling and emotion while using consumer-centric aspirational visuals, producing creative work that cuts through to business and consumer alike. 

Marketing comms for EVERYBODY 

Ultimately, in this digitally led world, there is more opportunity than ever for hard-hitting creative marketing to be seen by more people. We need to be taking learnings from consumer marketing and using these as the special sauce on top of the more traditional B2B marketing techniques. It is not instead of what was done before, it's layered up on top and delivered over time.  

Throughout the lifecycle of a campaign, we need to first attract and this is where we use emotion, narrative and aspirational creative to excite our audience into paying attention, once we have them in the funnel, we then need to validate our proposition through a series of more detail focused communications in the engage phase, educating audiences through wider brand proposition content and partnership activities, while driving final conversion through the more traditionally B2B channels of brand experience (sales teams, activations/events, CRM etc).

Putting this into practice with Life Fitness/Hammer Strength, the brand has been relaunched with a new positioning and messaging that focuses on brand purpose, in a way that speaks directly to its core customer base in B2B.