How elastic is your brand story?

After the longest time, CEOs in our organisations had come around to the need to build a brand and not just a business. Industry commentators were furiously writing up their evidence in trade publications to say so.

Global agencies like Dentsu commissioned research which, among other findings, declared that raising ‘brand awareness and top of funnel performance’ had jumped from the sixth most important factor in B2B success in 2021, to the most crucial in 2024.

Amid all the celebratory noise, we figured the evidence and data had done its job. We’d finally be able to fully go to market; fulfil the entirety of our marketing remit with investment in long-lasting brand-building activity to complement and support our bottom of funnel sales activation. 

God, how wrong we were.

Yes, a deeper understanding of marketing might be there on the other side of the negotiating table. Sadly however, resources and budgets continue to be squashed down flat in an era defined by a blunt four word instruction: “Do More With Less.”

Even before the chaos of Donald Trump’s White House started bouncing global stock markets around with such volatility, economies had yet to properly find their feet again after the pandemic.

The culture of investment in business growth had changed; a permanent correction? Or an extended dip? We were still working it out.

But with dust yet to settle, most businesses are now adjusting to a ‘Do More With Less’ environment that feels long-term. 

And for marketing that means not just fewer people, tighter budgets and higher expectations, but also a return to the status quo; hard restrictions on any investment in activity that doesn’t generate rapid and visible ROI.   

So what’s our next move? 

For me, it’s got to have something to do with us focusing on bigger, more striking and certainly more elastic stories. 

The only realistic chance marketers have to do some meaningful brand-building is to write bigger stories that stretch further across all the individual campaigns and bottom of funnel activities they’ll be pressed to prioritise. 

It’s always been an anomaly that while B2B sales cycles are longer than those in B2C, often spanning almost a year, the duration of an average B2B marketing campaign tends to max out at about three months.

We need to work harder to find the marketing positioning, the stories and narratives, that define us; and that we’d be proud to still be telling 18 months from now. 

Hell, if we can, we need to work on making them punchier, funnier, more entertaining (which - the data tells us - makes them more memorable).

And we must continue to arm our leadership teams with new evidence whenever it emerges, that brand building is as important to the success of the bottom of the B2B sales funnel as it is at the top.

There’s a widespread tendency for businesses to treat B2B marketing as just the one thing they happen to excel at; lead gen, a focus on data; expert storytelling and content creation; paid media or a strong business development engine and so on. Actually, the truth is that it’s all these things.  

You need to be doing everything - but with less.

How and where can you save money and optimise resources? Well, for a start, by not having to begin your story-building (a different skill from storytelling) from scratch every time you kick off a new campaign. 

Confectionary giant Kit-Kat has built its global appeal from the ‘Have A Break’ positioning - unchanged in almost 70 years. Ask any car enthusiast to tell you what Audi’s tagline is, or any teenager for that of McDonald’s - nobody’s giving you the wrong answer. Those lines are deeply embedded. More than that, they’re trusted.

They’re big, timeless and elastic stories that can stretch across any idea, any campaign and any channel.    

We in B2B should resist the temptation to get bored of our own great creative work after using it just once or twice. The most vital skills we can develop for the near future as B2B marketers are patience, commitment, focus, association and depth.

Embrace the creativity needed to come up with a story that genuinely means something to your audience. Then, once tested, stick with it; optimise it, squeeze it - rinse it - use all of its value. Waste nothing. ‘Nose-to-tail’ storytelling.

It saves your marketing team time and resources. And it saves your grateful customer from having to remember who the hell you are. 

After all, that customer is just like you - they’re looking for new articulations and evidence for the case they’re trying to build internally to buy your product or service. If you’ve already hit upon an extraordinarily powerful customer insight that’s working for them, double down on it. Don’t get bored of it. Don’t get distracted. If you stray, you’ll only end up having to find another dart to toss in hope.

Keep the inspiration going. Explore more brand storytelling insights and resources here.