thefunnel

What is the value and how do you measure a B-2-B brand? A common theme in marketing literature is that the value of a brand can be expressed by two factors: Are customers willing to recommend you, and are they willing to pay a premium? Both factors are obviously good to know and have their own implications on your position and marketing / pricing strategy, but before you start to drill down deeper into the recommend factor, you really don’t have any actionable insight. To look what’s behind whether or not someone will recommend you, you have to look at individual brand attributes. Every brand is different, and you can go as deep or wide as possible, but for many B-2-B products it comes down to the following higher level categories: Price, Product quality, Quality of service and support / technical support, Knowledge of the sales organization / representative and product fit to the customer need. Each of these can be individually measured to further understand for what attribute a company is under-performing or performing well. But, that is not enough, because all customers are not equal and every attribute must be further segmented by various types  customer. At a minimum these are customers, non-customers and competitors customers. Depending on the company strategy existing customers might also have to be segmented into key accounts and others. In addition attributes needs to be segmented by product category. All this creates a challenge for marketers in regards to the qualified sample size, but since brand perceptions change slowly for many b-2-b products, it’s better to measure extensively less frequently, rather than do quick on the surface assessment that only provides artificial non-actionable benchmarks.

One way to measure social media is through using NPS as a metric. Think about it. Social media is all about customers having conversations about your brand, and the ultimate question is, would they recommend your product, service or brand, or do they fall into the category of talking negatively about you? So if you track the conversations, and develop a way of rating these conversations, you have a metric. The metric is about your brand, the communication channel just happen to be social media. Combine this with some other marketing best practices, such as unhappy customersare each likely to talk about you with 10 other customer, which has a compounding effect on the negative conversations about you. Example. Let’s say your promoters % is 80 and you detractor % is 20, leading to an NPS score of 60%, quite good. However, lets now imaging that all the detractors talk to ten of their friends, therefore amplifying the negative message to 200%, while only two of your promoters talk positively about you leading to a a score of 160%. Suddenly your real NPS score has turned into a negative 40%. Using this math, you need 8 out of 10 of your customers to be a promoter, and a maximum of 1 out of 10 to be a detractor to hit a NPS of 60%. This really shows the power of social media, and the importance of customer satisfaction, and the importance of participating (by at least listening) and helping to create positive conversations. It’s could also be a way to determine what your social media strategy should be. If for example you have a really high NPS score, you need to go all out and capitalize on this. If your NPS score is low, and although you can’t control social media,  you need to consider a different approach.

The second problem relates to the brand and how to measure what customer value and why they buy. In working on my dissertation for my MSc, I created a “value model” for my research framework, and although this provided good insight into the buying decision, I’ve always been frustrated by not being able to put the model to “work” and make it more practical for everyday marketing. There are also other aspects to this same problem area that I’ve come across in various awareness / preference / customer satisfaction data. One of the most fascinating discussions I had with customers was when I did some research into what content customers value. I was talking to one extremely loyal customer who has always purchased a particular product (let’s call this product A) from us, and probably always will. In the conversation I asked him the question about why he doesn’t buy other (different category, but similar usage, for the conversation let’s call this product B) products from us. His answer was. “You are not the “B product company are you”! This is true, but not the rational answer that you would expect from an engineer (always rational, looking only at what will best solve their problems). His answer explains, why a company can score relatively well in awareness and preference research, and also in many cases being considered as an alternative for “a secondary product”, but when the purchase order is placed, it’s always for the competitors product. So here we have a company, ours, that scores high on all important brand and product attributes, for both products (A and B), but somehow despite scoring high, this customer decides to allways buy product A from us, but never buys product B. Same company, same sales person, same service department. The obvious question to ask in situations like this is, are we faced with managing several brands (by product category) instead of the one brand. The many brands theory also works the other way and would explain why our competitors haven’t achieved a bigger market share in the product A category although they’ve been trying for years. The business implications of this is that entering new product categories, although they are adjacent, on the same bench, for the same customer, is going to take a lot more work and longer that most people realize. It will also call for completely different marketing strategies and tactics. Generating a lead, issuing a quote or being invited to a do a demo is not enough, to declare a marketing success.