Business to business or B2B marketing is a completely different game which is known to few and understood by even fewer.
Mr. Sriram Gopalaswamy, Lenovo Marketing Head conducted an interactive and insightful session with the students of Indian Institute of Management, Rohtak.
The foremost reason why most people do not understand what is B2B marketing is because they are not the end customers and thus may not be aware of the process. To convince a Company to buy a product in a B2B scenario, I would have to convince five decision makers and if I am targeting companies mapped across the world, then these decision makers would be from completely different backgrounds, living in different cultures and different economies. The importance of targeting a large number of companies is that targeting a limited set of companies for awareness turns the marketing funnel into a pipe and thus, reduces opportunities.
Starting with the very basics of B2B marketing, Mr. Sriram Gopalaswamy presented the funnel of Awareness-Consideration-Preference in a collective light. He emphasised on how the components of this funnel should be utilised at the same time in order to ensure that your messaging goes across the markets.
Explaining further on this, he gave the examples of Kern and Swon’s Gnome experiment and Volvo’s Van Dam marketing campaign. The value proposition of products of both of these companies was very technical and sophisticated. “This is what normal B2B marketers miss out on. The way is to market that same level of sophistication to the highest manager, communicate the mundane concepts in an interesting manner, such that even a layman can understand said concepts. B2B marketers have to push their product and make their product look exciting so that their clients would want to watch the advertisement again and again.” said Mr. Gopalaswamy.
The same ideology is reflected in the subtle and simple marketing campaigns of Lenovo in their Grinder tests for Lenovo laptops and the Silent test for their Thinkpads with the CEOs and COOs of various companies.
Towards the end of the lecture, Mr. Gopalaswamy related the differences between B2C and B2B marketing to the Nobel Prize winning concept of the psychology of decision-making and behavioural economics by Daniel Kahneman. He said, “B2B marketing has to appeal to the System 1 or deliberative and logical mindset of the decision makers of the companies."