The B2B attention challenge : Why repositioning your brand is about stories, not campaigns.

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

This is the third in our five part series looking at common business problems that you can solve with your B2B content strategy - you can read the first two 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

We’re really interested in the kind of B2B marketing challenges companies have that aren’t just about final attribution clicks. What kind of issues you would like us to explore? Send me an email if you have any suggestions - and we’ll get our teams’ brains on the problems asap!

The Message:

Your brand is a social construct - if you want to change it, you need to create stories that people will want to share.

When you think of repositioning or rebranding, the common thing to do is to think about the outside surface of your company: your logo, colour palettes, advertising campaigns, website copy, etc. We think about repositioning as a visual thing - commissioning new ads or design is a bit like painting the outside of your house or getting a new haircut. It feels good, because we assume that what people think about us is mostly influenced by what we look like on the surface.

But what if that’s wrong?

In fact, research shows that your brand isn’t primarily visual - it’s a social construct made up of the stories people remember about their experience of your brand. It’s a narrative construct, not a visual one. And that narrative is defined and reinforced not by what people see from you directly, but about how they talk about you with their peers.

Let’s explore this by diving into some statistics about the average B2B buyers’ journey:

The Quote:

There are two key takeaways from this brilliant research from 6Sense. The first is that buying is a social process - it involves teams of people discussing requirements, evaluating potential solutions and vendors, and researching industry analyst ratings and recommendations. So when you are repositioning your brand, you are trying to be a part of the conversations flowing between a group of around 9 people, not one buyer scrolling through search or social content.

These stories will come from a range of sources - their previous experience with potential vendors, recommendations from peers, from experts in the sector, and, yes, from you as a potential vendor. But it’s important to remember that is a social, narrative process - sharing information and recommendation as stories.

The second is that this social storytelling process will happen in a way that is almost entirely invisible to potential vendors. 6Sense found that on average 70% of the buyer journey happens before the buyer approaches a vendor, and by the time they do approach someone, they have pretty much made up their mind who they want to go with. So the chance of you affecting a buying decision with a targeted campaign or outbound message is extremely small.

The Insight

Our insight is that if you want to change your brand’s position in your market, focus on creating stories that people will want to share with each other. Your buyers’ decisions will be made in conversation, not in isolation. And these conversations are not really about your brand - they’re about the social relationships between the group.

This has long been well understood by B2C brands. Susan Fournier, the Professor of Marketing at Boston University, wrote a landmark research paper in 1998 on relationship theory and brands. Part of the paper describes interviews with three women as they describe how they feel about the branded products they buy. It’s notable how often their choices about brands are expressed or influenced by their identities and social relationships

A lot of B2B marketers miss the social context of buyers’ decision making, and assume that procurement processes are entirely rational, data driven processes. The insights from 6Sense research and Fournier’s paper show that this isn’t strictly true. Choosing a brand to buy is a deeply social process, regardless of whether you are buying sauces or SAASes.

The Action

Shifting your brand repositioning strategy from something visual to something narrative is a bold move. After all, it’s easy to show your bosses and peers a new website, logo or ad campaign. It’s harder to show that people are talking about you in new ways. But it can be done.

We worked with Pearson, the leading educational publisher, on a project to help them show their commitment to diversity in STEM education. They are a dominant player in their market, but as is often the case with market leaders, sometimes seen as out of touch. In fact, Pearson had a long standing commitment to diversity and equity, but it wasn’t cutting through.

We created a new brand - Nevertheless - based around a podcast series that told stories of diverse pioneers in STEM education from history and the present day, from Sister Mary, the Catholic nun who was the first woman to work at the Dartmouth College Computer Center, to a student takeover episode produced by students in London, Johannesburg and Virginia.

But the biggest success wasn’t just the podcast - it was a series of free downloadable posters we commissioned celebrating STEM role models from different countries around the world. We created them because we’d heard many times from the Nevertheless audience that they wanted ways to celebrate diverse STEM pioneers, so we commissioned emerging illustrators in each country to design a poster, and then put the results on the Nevertheless site.

The response was incredible - the posters have now been downloaded over 1.5m times, and shared between teacher communities online and offline around the world. We’ve seen them printed as huge posters in the atrium of Miami’s Frost Science Museum, displayed proudly in classrooms all over the world (I even saw them during parent’s day at my daughters’ school!), shared by influential bloggers, and displayed on giant screens in a school library in Kentucky.

Even though they were produced in 2018, we still see people sharing and using the posters every year, especially around International Women’s Day. Just last year, a school in the UK used the posters to rename their science labs!

It’s probably the biggest impact one of our story projects has had, and it worked because we made something that wasn’t just about Pearson - it was about the conversations their audiences and customers were having.

We helped change their brand by getting people talking. After all, that’s what great stories do.

What Do You Think?

Have you successfully changed your brand by changing the stories people tell about you? We’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re working in B2B areas that work with complex procurement processes. We’re convinced that reaching people in that first 70%, when the buying team is having conversations with each other, is more effective than bottom of the funnel campaigns, but we’d like to have more evidence to prove it.

If you’ve got a great case study, pleas 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!