By Katherine Lee, Executive Strategy Director, Athletics
Recently, we had a number of clients approach us with questions around how they should show up as a B2B2C brand, and that led me to reconsider the line between B2B and B2C — and why today’s market may be asking brands to rethink that line.
The mere mention of the term, B2B, and my brain goes to a specific place. I see lovely, trustworthy blues, people in shades of business casual, shaking hands or enthusiastically frozen in the act of collaborating in a conference room. If it’s a tech company, maybe a smartboard. I feel myself folded into the safe, pragmatic embrace of the literal. Speeds n’ feeds. Big spec energy? Yes. “Let me tell you about my product/service and what it does for your business.”
Then, with the rise of DTC, we started to see a shift. Surrounded by feel-good DTC brands, people started to understand that maybe even business buyers could be influenced like regular humans. We stopped to ask ourselves, wait, aren’t business buyers just people?.And if the buyers behind these corporate entities are just people, then isn’t B2B the sae as B2C? Thus we entered the era of convergent evolution, where B2B branding began to take cues from the tone and style of consumer brands. Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed the B2B migration towards a more purpose-driven face, borrowing from the DTC playbook to tap into humanity and emotional connection.
For the B2B2C brands, this approach had its merits. For one, it helped to bring clarity and consistency to brand management. For those companies with diverse, fragmented audience ecosystems, from consumers, day-to-day users and managers to decision-makers and buyers, it helped make things simpler. There’s something so satisfying about one unified brand for all. But that comes at a cost. For brands with complex audience ecosystems, there’s a real delta between the needs of the everyday consumer and those of the business customer. At its most monolithic, simplicity comes at the expense of the branding that feels like it’s truly designed to the needs of its customers. For argument’s sake, let’s look at a brand like Amazon. The average Amazon shopper is a universe away from an AWS buyer.
Today, though, following a glorious decade of zero interest rates exuberance, the market’s correcting. With increasing scrutiny on how they invest, almost every brand is feeling the pressure to make moves that feel more personalized, more targeted, more measurable, more likely to generate the desired return. So these days there seems to be a renewed interest in rethinking an ages-old question that we thought we’d put to bed. For years now, clients have come to us asking us to help them think through how to show up as one coherent brand, even when they have a consumer audience that has totally different needs from their business audience. But today, as we settle into austerity times, and branding and marketing leaders are being asked to prove the value of their efforts, we’re finding ourselves in a moment where we’re reconsidering this stance. The next chapter of B2B v. B2C seems to be moving in the direction of a more blended approach.
There are a couple specific cases we interrogated. First, does it change anything if a brand starts out as a consumer brand and then makes inroads into business or enterprise? We recently worked with a client who had built an incredible consumer equity around their wearable technology. They’d begun to deploy in B2B settings: for tracking metrics across health research participants, helping to identify moments of need in vulnerable populations for insurers, for employees working in high-stress, mission-critical roles. As this company took their first steps into the B2B world, they found that, while their slick, sophisticated, well-known consumer brand might get them past the door, it lacked the industrial grade credibility they needed to convince a business buyer. This was especially true in cases where they were in the room with people working in more regulated spaces, like healthcare, insurance or public sector. That’s when they approached us: to think through how they could lean into the hard-won equities in their consumer brand, while building a B2B presence on top of it to solve for some of the challenges of connecting with business buyers in more serious settings. So what was the lesson? It was paramount that we build on the established equities of the consumer brand. We chose to stay with winning formulas in their photography style and typography, but expand the content of the photography to be more inclusive of the different industries they were speaking to, expanding from an individualist view to imagery showing many. The most striking visual signal was to assign previously lesser-used darker colors from the brand palette to business communications, versus the very light-infused palette deployed in consumer communications. The shift in toolkit was subtle, the effect dramatic. In the end, the consumer brand and the business brand felt very much in the same family, reinforcing the cohesion and consistency, while signalling that the brand was taking its B2B business seriously. This revealed a tension at the heart of this brand architecture consideration: consumer equity can open doors, but business credibility seals the deal.
What about in the opposite scenario, where a brand’s gravity is in the business-to-business market but over time, but they also have a real stake in winning with consumers? Some of the most interesting examples are in the world of modern and concierge health offerings, like One Medical, Tia Health, Maven Clinic, or Galileo. All of these companies are selling to employers or health plans, but they are also delivering services directly to patients and consumers – in healthcare, which has always been a very emotional space. So they need a brand experience that brings empathy to the patient experience while still speaking to the more functional needs of the businesses who may be choosing this as a benefit to provide to employees or populations of patients. These companies benefit greatly from consumers who love them and ask for them by name, and they’re learning more and more the value that brand love translates into. As these B2B brands shift toward a more consumer-facing presence, they often need to revisit their brand promise, reevaluating how well it continues to serve them in both business and consumer-facing settings. A space of shared value between the brand and all of their audiences becomes the necessary foundation that brings consistency across different audience communications. But modern brands make space for volume control and tone modulation, so communications can still feel authentic to the brand, whether it’s a message in a moment of crisis or a Throwback Thursday post. In contrast to the wearable brand, which had to find ways to temper its brand for enterprise buyers, many of these health brands seek to elevate emotional connection to reach patients.
All this is to say that the cultural pendulum seems to be swinging back towards a more blended approach. While brands are unwilling to relinquish hard-won cohesion, there’s some movement toward pushing against monolithic rigidity, in favor of a more flexible, realist’s approach. I’d say that pragmatism is the sign of the times.
