Here at The Think Tank, we take a pretty cerebral approach to our B2B marketing strategies, particularly when developing the brands of our brilliant B2B clients. By combining evidenced-based behavioural science with our expert understanding of our clients’ audiences, we work with our partners to devise fresh, bold and impactful ideas.
Why is impactful branding so important?
First, let’s quickly sum up why developing a strong brand is so important for long term success (if you’re interested, we go into more depth about the power of B2B branding here).
For marketers, the temptation is always to reach for the short term gains offered by performance activity. But whilst performance marketing is an important factor in an overall marketing strategy, without effective branding and brand awareness to back it up you’ll never get that full return on investment.
Quality branding creates an emotional connection with audiences that serves as a driver of long-term growth and boosts the impact of performance activity. Without brand investment, businesses are essentially starting afresh with each new marketing campaign, which is a wasteful and ineffective use of resources.
By developing an impactful brand, businesses give themselves the best platform to trigger buying decisions – and it’s a well they can keep going back to.
So, how should businesses go about building a decision-triggering brand proposition?
B2B branding: connecting reason with feeling
There’s a few routes you can go down, but The Think Tank always applies our own tried and tested method. It stems from one evergreen insight: even in business, decision making is seldom logical.
Sometimes in the world of B2B, it’s easy to forget that all business decisions are made by people; emotional, complicated, messy people. When you’re marketing to them, it’s not a given that they’ll always choose the logical option. Throwing stats and rationales at the wall is no guarantee of success – you’ve got to win hearts as well as minds.
But why is that? Well, behavioural scientists have identified two forms of thinking – or rather, two ‘systems’ – that occur in the decision making process.
System 1 thinking is fast and automatic. Information is processed quickly, in a way that’s informed by past experience and context, and it’s the basis of emotional decision making.
System 2 thinking, on the other hand, is slower and more deliberate. It’s the process more likely to lead to rational, considered decisions.
To take audiences on a journey from brand awareness to conversion, marketers need to think about how they can appeal to both decision-making systems.
Firstly, system 1 thinking has to be engaged via an emotional approach. Creating a compelling narrative is an essential way of priming an emotional response. This can be done through storytelling, a carefully crafted tone of voice, an expression of core values or any other way you care to think of that expresses your brand’s personality. It’s all about considering how you want customers to perceive your brand.
Once that strong connection is formed, your audience will be ready to listen to rational arguments that appeal to their system 2 way of thinking. Having formed that emotional foundation, it’s time to supply relevant, structured and engaging information that can help to trigger a buying decision.
By taking an approach that balances emotional connection with logical reasoning, brands can communicate their value proposition in a way that engages, interests and persuades their audience.
Take an expert-driven approach
So there you have it: the basis of decision-triggering brand propositions.
But knowing the theory is one thing. Having the insights and knowledge to apply it is another.
At The Think Tank, we’ve been combining creativity with our understanding of our clients’ audiences across a range of sectors to develop perception-changing, conversion-driving brands for over 30 years. Our approach has formed the basis of countless successful brand awareness campaigns for our clients – just take a look at our case studies.So, whether you’re starting from scratch, looking for a redo or just want to fine tune your existing brand proposition, get in touch to see how we can help.
