How slobbery dogs can inspire the antidote to boring B2B marketing

B2B. Boring. Dull. Tedious. Safe. Not-risky. Won’t get fired. Safety in numbers. Not distinctive. Not effective. Marketing doesn’t work. And round and round and round we go.

But.

The evidence continues to pile up for the virtues of brand investment in B2B. I’ve talked about it before, so won’t revisit it just now. But it’s there, it’s credible, and it’s compelling.

However.

Have a listen to Episode 1 of the “Let’s Make This More Interesting” podcast where Adam Morgan talks to Peter Field about some recent delving into the IPA Effectiveness data bank. Peter cites evidence that ‘dull’ advertising costs £10 million more than ‘interesting’ advertising to achieve the same result (more in some categories) – you can buy success, but it’s darn expensive. The System 1 research sited in the accompanying slide pack suggests 78 per cent of B2B ad responses as neutral, compared to 48 per cent of B2C ad responses. B2B is being substantially duller than B2C, which is seemingly very dull itself.

This makes me sad.

The ingredients for success are there. And large swathes of B2B marketers are squandering the opportunity. Ads are being made, media budgets spent. On what? On Dull.

Partially, this will be down to the role of marketing being reduced to delivering leads into a sales funnel. This demands short-term performance media models and a prevalence of rational messaging. But partially this is also down to playing it too safe, not bucking the trend, not daring to peak above the parapet.

Which brings us to slobbering dogs.

The thinking fast bit of Kahneman, which is the interesting bit when it comes to keeping Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson, et al happy, boils down to Pavlovian (associative) conditioning. Neurons that fire together, wire together to form the memory structures of system 1.

Food… slobbery dog, bell and food… slobbery dog, and eventually bell… slobbery dog.

What is sometimes overlooked in this gooey, and frankly a bit gross, experiment is salience. Dogs love food, food equals salient. They care less about bells, but the bell, to the fine hearing apparatus of the faithful hound, is a strong signal. Bell equals salient. This makes the firing together, and wiring together memory structure more straightforward to achieve. If the signals weren’t so salient, you’d have to make up for the lack of salience with repetition.

I’m guessing you can see where I’m going with this. The lack of salient signals in their marketing is precisely why so many B2B marketers are having to pay the dull tax; they are having to force success by paying the repetition piper.

It stands to reason that the B2B customer is a human whose memory works in the same way as everyone else’s. They may well be right in the window of purchase decision and receptive to rational messages as to why they should consider a particular brand. But the chances are that they’re not. They’re probably not going to even think about replacing their incumbent for 5 years. In which case, you need to build some salient memory structures, so that all the good stuff – the mental availability etc., is all there when they are interested and starting to think about what they need.

Let’s replace our slobbery dog with a B2B customer who is going to be buying a particular B2B brand in the future. How can B2B marketers create the conditions for that B2B customer to salivate at the prospect of our B2B brand showing up? Naturally, the answer is creating salient signals to create strong associative memory structures for our brand.

The starting point is finding something more emotional to connect your brand to. From their broader life, your B2B Customer will have some neurones dedicated to things such as feeling supported, feeling appreciated, feeling good at their job etc. Not so much the technical specifications of whatever fascinating widget it is that our B2B brand has to sell. It’s easier to make connections to neurons that already exist. And, of course, if those neurones represent something powerful in the customer’s value system and that’s relevant to the buying decision, then connecting a brand to them will be a good thing.

Pick only a few things to associate to your brand. Firing together, wiring together to build memory structures will be faster and more effective the simpler it is. If Pavlov had tried to associate many different sounds all at the same time to the provision of food, he would simply have ended up with a very confused pooch wondering why its dinner time is such an auditory kerfuffle.

Ensure the connections you’re building are distinctive. Imagine a model of things that fire together, wire together for a particular category. There’s going to be a whole load of things that are the same for all brands. Clearly these are things that don’t need to be reinforced. It’s what makes the brands different from each other within the category that needs to be exploited to make a different memory structure for our B2B brand.

Finally, do the above everywhere all the time – to wire together, those neurons need to fire together after all. The more firing, the stronger the wiring. Sometimes repetition is a good thing!

The concepts outlined here shouldn’t be unfamiliar. They are part of the effectiveness guidance that have long been accepted in B2C. They are just examined here using the psychology of memory and with a B2B lens applied. At The Gate, we’ve long talked about “B2B insight, B2C creative” as the cure for dull B2B which we have applied to the likes of Marketreach and AkzoNobel. This phrase recognises the human decision maker at the other end, but also recognises the complexity of the B2B context in which they operate. Slobbery dogs help us to understand why this maxim is so powerful.

By considering how the memory structures are built that can make dogs slobber at the sound of a bell, we can learn techniques for how to avoid dull B2B. If we create consistent work that contains salient signals of just a few distinctive and emotional concepts we can break free from dull and create interesting.

James Devon is the chief strategy officer at The Gate