Consumer (NOT customer) is the Boss- Changing approach for B2B marketing

Changing paradigms for B2B Businesses such as IT: An Observation

I could see this change happening across businesses which is in line with SAP's overall strategy, but maybe we do have a need to acknowledge this more overtly to act faster and get that competitive advantage in the marketplace. Sharing my thoughts on this & will welcome reactions from the rest of the community here.

Customer & consumer, for many people they might seem like synonyms. But in reality the difference between them is extremely significant & is increasing each day at a tremendous pace especially for B2B businesses. The impact of this change can be far reaching for entire business strategy for many organizations.

Customer vs. Consumer

Let us start with the basics, Customer is any individual or organization as a whole which takes a buying decision keeping views of the multiple stakeholders in mind.

Consumer, on the other hand, is the individual who will finally end up using the product each day to do his job.

Traditionally, Consumers have been considered a subset of customer as one of the many stakeholders. This still holds true but what is changing drastically now is the balance of power among different stakeholders.

Changing Times

Gone are the days where IT budgets were growing each year and CIOs & IT managers could buy any product they wanted with minimum intervention from business. Today, increasingly Business demands dictate IT purchases. While no one can undermine relationships that Sales Executives make with the decision makers in organizations but today it is not sufficient without a fantastic product which is being marketed in the right way for those end consumers. That basic phenomenon is leading to a change in the way entire organizations need to start thinking especially product design & marketing.

At the essence of it are two fundamental ideas of Design thinking & Pull Marketing come together to maximize around the fact that “It’s the Consumer (NOT customer) who is the Boss”.

Adapting to this New World

In this new iEconomy everything including Enterprise solutions need to be beautiful, intuitive, simple & yet highly efficient.

Design Thinking needs to be at the heart of a solution’s drawing board in the form of intended User Experience, even before the first line of code is written. This calls for a superior understanding of end user, that too, personally for everyone involved in the development of the solution.

There are numerous examples in other industries, such as when Unilever went about the task of creating the next big thing in Laundry for emerging countries its R&D members lived with some Lower middle class families in India to really live their lives & in the true sense putting themselves in the Consumer’s shoes. That is the direction where solution design needs to move if we truly want the Consumer to want our products.

Pull Marketing is something that traditionally B2C marketers have focused all their attention on, while for B2B it has always been push focusing on the decision makers. But with consumer at the center of creating demand for B2B products, marketers need to redesign strategies & touchpoints where consumers or end users will most likely be able to see us & will be most susceptible to their messaging. While the concept is the same as B2C, executionally one needs to understand & tweak to suit the Business Consumers.

Pull Marketing: Over-deliver and make them say WOW

1)    Brand Centric: Creating a strong brand identity centered at a positive experience for the consumer. This happens when the Product attributes, like design or support experience, over-deliver on their expectations. More often than not, her expectation is just adding simplicity to her daily work.

It could also be marketing driven, such as doing activities that create such situations of positive experience of over delivering. E.g. Webinar focused on how a product makes a significant change before & after in simplifying her life.

Additionally, inspirational & consistent marketing language in mass media adds to the Brand centric pull creation.

2)    Product centric: This is very specific to a certain group of users of a particular solution. It’s a 3 step process:

a.    WHO: The First step is to understand the Pain points for the consumer. This is the key for everything that follows. As a marketer, there is no replacement for a crystal clear understanding of your consumer. Humanize the understanding by giving him a name along with personality attributes.

b.    WHAT: The next step is to identify how your solution is able to over-deliver vs. the current situation & improve his life.

c.    HOW: Focus on that improvement and create demos/webinars/collateral which talk to these consumers in their simple language about their problems. Also important to understand where the consumer is susceptible to getting your message e.g. an offsite presentation for just 10 employees of a department where you could WOW them enough for them to go back & talk to their peers might be much more cost effective than bombarding all 1000 of them with links for specific online trainings.

This is fundamental shift in the way all organizations need to think & act, build & market for not just who buy your products rather focus on those who will use them eventually.