Humanising B2B brands

For many years agencies have written about branding being more than just a logo. A brand represents everything a business stands for, its values, personality and ethics all distilled into a palette of assets designed to enable a business to speak with its audience.

Brand has always been associated with business to consumer marketing but it is just as important for business to business communication.

It’s all too easy to forget that businesses are just collections of people making both rational and emotional decisions every day. When applied to B2B communication, emotive messaging underpinned by rational benefits can be a very powerful communication tool for modern day organisations. At KISS, we spend a lot of time encouraging our clients to lead with the heart as well as the head.

General Electric (GE) is a great example of B2B communication taking a very human and humorous approach in its advertising. Its campaign ‘The Boy that Beeps’ humanises large scale technology, spinning an engaging tale around its primary business offering.

‘Raining Octopuses’ is just plain silly, with the main message being that GE systems can cope with everything from the everyday to the ridiculous: this is also a great example of how an advertising campaign can cross the physical divide, when GE partnered with Greig Brebner, founder of Blunt to support the development of the Octobrella. Going viral on social media, proving that the digital and social platforms that are commonly used for consumer messaging work just as well for B2B campaigns.

Digital marketing and social media enables businesses to engage directly with their business partners, opening up a dialogue between both parties. The same brand principles of openness, integrity and humanity that are applied to customer relations are just as applicable in business relationships.

So there is no longer a need for businesses to be reserved and stuffy, be open and communicate directly to people, not the organisations they represent.