Do you think the Information Age is over? I’m sort of hoping it is, but given the state of my Inbox, Netflix list and uncategorized Evernote scribbles, I’m thinking it’s still with us. Too bad, I’m kind of looking forward to the Dream Society.
The Dream Society is the age which, according to Danish designer and innovation expert, Rolf Jensen, will succeed our current mess. Once the robots are finally doing the scut work and Christmas lights can untangle themselves, Jensen predicts we’ll stop buying stuff and start buying lifestyles.
His 1999 book paints a pretty compelling picture of the world in the 2020s, (on which, we’d better get busy if we’re going to make that deadline). It’s a world where marketers position around stories and emotions. He proposes six emotional markets:
- Adventures for Sale
- The Market for Togetherness
- The Who Am I Market
- The Market for Peace of Mind
- The Market for Caring
- The Market for Convictions
Don’t worry, I’m not going to review it here, but if you haven’t read the book, it’s really quite good and not very long, and if you consider its age, it’s stood up rather well.
In taking another look at Jensen, I am moved to wonder what emotional markets B2B could be rocking. Here are a few ideas:
1. The Market for Professional Community:
Business people have plenty of professional communities that are all about governance and regulation and certification, which is a good and necessary thing. Vendors have an opportunity, however, to step in at a different level and build their own communities.
User groups have been a mainstay of tech companies for ages, but many of them have faded away. If you make a B2B tech product, especially an ERP-level thing, you owe it to yourself and your users to breathe a little life into the user groups and user conferences.
I’m also a big fan of the think groups folks like Sirius Decisions, Corporate Executive Board and Gartner put together. Of course they are fantastic ways to upsell and cross-sell like crazy but they do a nice job of capitalizing on a natural community and mostly they add some great value in the form of networking, access to experts and an excuse to go drinking.
I think there is a lot of fertile ground in the un-connected portions of our customer bases. Who among your customers and end users is not already part of a professional association or industry group? Go find them and help them belong to a community.
2. The Market for I Still Have a Job
We know that B2B purchases are more emotional than B2C purchases (with obvious exceptions) by virtue of the personal risk that accompanies most decisions.
So if there is risk in fu*king up the choice of a consultant or the supplier of a component then there must also be solace and safety in getting it right. Let’s pretend our product is the latter. Let’s imagine what happens when choosing our solution means the decision maker is a hero.
This means our job is to make sure we get it right every, single time for this customer so they can get it right every single time for their company.
The truth is, people who are always blaming their vendors, however legitimately, eventually start to lose credibility and when that happens, their little box on the org chart suddenly disappears.
3. The Market for Personal Brand
No. Wait! Don’t Go! I’m as sick of personal branding as you are. Possibly sicker of it than you are. Let’s take a deep breath here and consider how we can turn this regrettable fad to our own advantage.
We saw above there is a giant opportunity for marketing to the buyers who can use our product to solve a problem and improve their reputation at work.
If we go a bit a further and can use content and some of those sweet communities to help them build external recognition for their expertise, then that’s an even bigger win. I’d be looking for great user stories, case studies and papers about how your customer changed the game using your product.
The more you can prop up your decision makers and users as subject matter experts, the deeper the emotional attachment to your brand and the more likely they are to take you with them when they jump ship.
4. The Market for Giving a Crap
This is a bit like Jensen’s Market for Caring, except this is the one where we market our customer service as something other than an under-funded after thought.
The MfGaC is well beyond that horrific “let’s differentiate on service” idea and is grounded instead in an actual culture that has actual people who actually care about what happens to our customers.
We don’t roll our corporate eyes when the phone rings and someone has the audacity to ask for help. Instead we look forward to the opportunity to serve.
We don’t invent self-serve, self-help, self-immolation processes that force our customers through ridiculous time-wasting mazes; we pick up the damn phone and make them great at their jobs.
We fix what’s broken and we go well past that to make sure it never breaks again. Figure this out and the rest falls into place, in my view.
5. The Market for Mastery
This is an output of the thing about community and the other thing about keeping your job, but it goes further. If brands can deliver the training and context and business acumen that employers can’t, we have a shot at helping our users build mastery. Not just in the use of our products, but in the way they do their jobs.
By conferring mastery on our customer champions, we do a couple of things: we get out of the circular conversations about innovation and become the defacto gold standard in our space
Well beyond a personal brand we now have our customers’ corporate brands lining up next to us as exemplars of innovation and forward thinking.
6. The Market for Standing for Something
This is exactly the same thing as Jensen’s Market for Conviction but I’m calling it out a little differently because I think most brands, when asked for conviction, head straight to an economic definition. Or possibly a prison sentence.
The decision makers for our products are about to be that annoying Gen Y crowd and that even more annoying generation after them. They are annoying not because they fail to use commas when they speak, but because they insist on a higher standard than us lazy Gen X people.
GenX is good with it if your brand chucks a little money at the local food bank each year. Gen Y is having none of that. They want to see us actually give a sh*t about lots of things, starting with our product and our customers and working out from there to our industry, the environment, the greater good and, yes, food banks.
Smart B2B brands will be thinking about this now and not delegating their corporate social responsibility to the summer student. This is about to be a very big deal and it needs to be thoughtful, nuanced and genuine.
The Dream Society may be a little behind schedule but there’s no reason we can’t start creating and using these emotional markets right now.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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