The B2B attention challenge : How to be the leader of an emerging sector

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools to grow your audiences’ attention.

This is the last in our five part series looking at common business problems that you can solve with your B2B content strategy - you can read the first four by clicking on the links below:

1: We work in a sector that is incredibly important, but overlooked
2: We work in a sector that is complex and often misunderstood
3: We are well established in our sector, but need to shift attitudes to our brand/positioning
4: We work in a sector that is diffuse and unconnected
5: We work in an emerging sector that hasn’t developed its own languages or rhythms yet

After this series we’re going to start a new series on how to create space in your B2B marketing strategy to try new things. We know from talking to clients that a lot of B2B strategies and budgets just get copied over from year to year, so how can you create space to try something new?

We’re going to give you some practical advice on finding a new story that makes you stand out, getting buy-in internally, exploring new distribution strategies, creating workflows that give your teams time for new experiments, and measuring success so you can keep doing the new thing. We’ve been thinking about turning this new series into webinars as well - if you’d be interested, let us know by replying to this email!

The Message:

If you want to be a leading voice in an emerging sector, the key is creating the rhythm that brings it together.

We have a couple of clients that are working in emerging sectors, where different groups of companies, pioneers and users are rapidly developing new products and services. This can make developing your B2B strategy really complex, as the sector often moves more quickly than your comms strategy, and your audiences can rapidly shift as well. That small group of early pioneers can quickly become competing companies with VCs giving them millions to scale their experiments. So when the pace of change is so fast and volatile, what can you do to stand out?

The answer is not to be the loudest voice, but to be the force that brings everyone together in your industry. When an emerging sector is a chaotic noise of competing players, dynamics and speeds, you don’t win by adding more noise. Instead, the most valuable thing you can do is bring order to the noise, and to do that, you need to really understand one of the most overlooked forces in how organisations and businesses work - rhythm.

The Quote:

Ok - it’s a bit gauche to quote yourself in your own newsletter, but there’s a good reason for this. Back in the early days of Storythings, I was asked by Rockefeller Foundation to attend a conference about storytelling and change, and in particular, to talk about how I’d used stories to change strategy in my digital roles at the BBC and Channel 4.

The trouble was, I don’t think I had changed any strategies at those organisations. I’d helped some really interesting projects happen, and won some awards, but when I left those broadcasters in 2011 they were still very much broadcasters, and despite audiences shifting increasingly to digital platforms, their digital departments did not really have much strategic influence. The old rhythms of TV and radio production still dominated.

So instead, I gave a talk for Rockefeller about why I thought we hadn’t managed to change anything, and the answer was rhythm. There’s a saying in theories of change management that culture eats strategy for breakfast - you can create a new strategy on paper, but unless the culture of your organisation is aligned to the new strategy, you’ll struggle to deliver it.

My years at the BBC and Channel 4 made me realise that there was something even deeper underneath culture - rhythm. As I say in the quote above, rhythm is the underlying cadence that structures not just the way your company works, but the whole sector you work in. If you work in publishing, for example, the rhythm of your work revolves around the big release of new titles in May for summer reads, and the even bigger release of Christmas titles in October, when the vast majority of books are sold.

These rhythms don’t just exist in one organisation - they synchronise the whole sector to make it easier for suppliers and buyers to work together. For the publishing example, this yearly rhythm helps commissioning editors, marketers, bookshops, reviewers, printers and distributors plan their work together.

This is the trouble we had with innovation at BBC and Channel 4. Some of the ideas we developed had very different, often faster, rhythms. This meant it was really hard to get people to change their ways of working to adopt new ideas, not because they were resistant themselves, but because the whole industry was used to working with that rhythm.

In the end, it took a major new market entrant with a different commissioning and distribution rhythm - Netflix - to change the rhythms of the traditional broadcasters to something more digital-first. Its very hard, almost impossible in my experience, to change the rhythm of an established sector from the inside. It takes a new entrant from outside the sector to change the rhythms, change the audience behaviours, and then change the business models. Only then will the rest of the sector embrace the new rhythms.

This directly affects the work we do at Storythings. When we’re working with a new client, particularly in a new sector, the first thing we do is try and work out what their underlying rhythms are. If we can understand this, it’ll mean we can be a lot more helpful and the work we do will have more of an impact.

The Insight

The great advantage of working in an emerging sector is that these rhythms will not yet be fully established. So there is a huge strategic advantage in establishing rhythms that work for you.

For example - before the iPhone, the tech sector’s rhythms revolved around big annual trade fairs like CES or Mobile World Congress. All the manufacturers would align their products and marketing towards these events in the hope of getting publicity and deals that would lead to consumer sales.

But Apple wanted to set its own rhythm, and used their Apple Developer and MacWorld events to launch their new devices outside of the traditional industry trade fairs. By doing so, they ensured that all the hype and attention would be focused solely on them, not their competitors. They quickly established a new rhythm for releasing their tech products that their competitors then had to follow. CES and Mobile World Congress still happen, but they are no longer as influential as they were in the pre-iPhone era.

The Action

We mentioned in our last newsletter that three simple value propositions for your content strategies are to create, curate, or convene. If you’re working in a new sector and want to establish a new rhythm, the most powerful strategy is to convene. If you can create the tent-pole events that your industry circles around, you will have real power and influence in your emerging sector.

Sometimes this can be through events. We’re huge fans of what Noah Brier is doing with his Brxnd.ai project, which started as a series of coding experiments exploring how Ai could be used in marketing and branding, but has now grown to a must-attend event in NYC, with big industry sponsors and some of the smartest speakers around.

But it’s not just about events - you can convene your sector around a big piece of content as well. This is what our client ADP does with their People At Work report every year. It’s a huge research undertaking, and brings together the kind of data and global insight that showcases ADP’s depth and breadth in their sector.

In the development and non-profit world, reports and events play a big role in establishing rhythms. The annual UN General Assembly is just about to start in NYC, and a lot of non-profits will be timing major reports and content initiatives to try and influence the attendees and debates. And in the climate sector, the COP events bring together wildly diverse communities of politicians, entrepreneurs, lobbyists and activists to try and move the needle on climate change targets.

So this is what I learned by failing to make innovative new ideas scale at the BBC and Channel 4. The problem was not just strategy or culture, but rhythm. If you are working in a mature sector, step back and try to see the underlying rhythms in your sector, and how it affects the way people organise the cadences of their work. Then use your understanding of these rhythms to decide when you need to work with them, and when you can work against them.

And if you’re working in a sector that doesn’t yet have established rhythms, then you’re in luck - you’ve got the chance to create your own.

What Do You Think?

What are the rhythms in your sector? How does this affect the way you create content or convene events? We’d love to learn more about how rhythms affects different sectors.

If you’ve got a great case study, please share it with us by hitting reply and we’ll feature you in the next newsletter.

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

See you next time!