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Malcolm gladwell hard decisions11/23/2023 ![]() ![]() B2B companies sell to narrow audiences, so advertising toĮven one of the most respected thinkers in business marketing, Geoffrey Moore, recently wrote that branding has no relevance to complex B2B companies, arguing that:.B2B products are too complex to reduce to a tagline or ad.B2B products do not promise to make you “cool” or “sexy” or any other aspirational attribute.B2B purchases are all about the relationship between the individual sales rep and the buyer if the B2B brand means anything, it is created by the sales rep.B2B buyers are rational decision makers (or a committee of rational decision makers) who are not swayed by emotional factors such as brands.Some experts argue that branding plays no role in B2B marketing. (And guess what? Giving out swag is not one of the tips.) Some May Disagree And in Part Three, I’ll give tips for how B2B marketers should think about building their brands and measuring their results. In Part Two, I’ll discuss the subtle differences between brand and reputation. In this post, Part One of an occasional series on B2B Branding, I’ll explain why I think branding is important to B2B companies, and why it should be part of your overall B2B marketing strategy. Is this really effective? Put more broadly, does branding even matter at B2B companies? Or is branding a waste of time and budget compared to “hard ROI” activities that can be proven to drive revenue? Proponents of swag will argue that it builds brand by getting the business’s name in the office of potential influencers and purchasers, where it will stay top of mind. What is the purpose of all this stuff? Does having a leather portfolio with a vendor’s logo on it make me more likely to buy their products? Strewn around my house are pens, coffee cups, calculators, USB memory sticks, and assorted swag from various companies I’ve met over the years. As the matches at Wimbledon will illustrate, even milliseconds matter.B2B Branding – Why Branding Matters in B2B Marketing Even if we have just half a second, we should wait as long as we possibly can. If we have a year, we should wait 364 days. If we have an hour, we should wait 59 minutes before responding. And once we have a sense of how long a decision should take, we generally should delay the moment of decision until the last possible instant. The core message of recent research is the opposite of the one Lehman’s executives learnt in 2005: the longer we can wait, the better. ![]() If Lehman had lived until today, its decision-making course would look radically different. Then, they rushed back to their offices and made some of the worst decisions in the history of financial markets. These managers sat for a cutting-edge course on the timing of decisions. Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, gave the capstone lecture. In autumn 2005, Lehman’s senior managers hired a group of experts to teach four dozen top executives how to make better decisions. One of the most surprising aspects of Lehman’s collapse was that the firm’s leaders had tried so hard to understand the problems associated with their own decision-making. In a recent Financial Times article, Partnoy uses a nearly identical example from Wimbledon to explain a parallel situation in the business world. ![]() “ Ball identification” is analogous to sizing up a situation in business. ![]() The key to being a good hitter is to gather information about the ball as quickly as possible, so as to leave time to process this information and make a decision on how to swing. The swing has been practiced so often it’s mechanical and not the important differentiator. The best hitters are the ones who wait the longest time to make a decision about whether to swing at a pitch. I’m writing this blog while watching a professional baseball game and the game itself reinforces Partnoy’s claim. ![]()
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