Emotion instead of Promotion

The marketing landscape is becoming increasingly interchangeable and cluttered. The good thing is that B2B marketing managers are learning how important customer orientation is: customer centricity is the new magic word. But companies that focus on brand and build brands have always known that the key to success is to create an emotional connection with the customer. However, many B2B marketers focus more on price, business value, and technical value because they still assume that B2B customers make purely rational decisions.
There are legitimate doubts about this. Google, in collaboration with CEB's Marketing Leadership Council, a leading U.S. consultancy, therefore conducted a major study that examined the accuracy of this "rational thesis" and its effectiveness. Mike Miller, Director of Business & Industrial Markets, reported on this at BMA 14, probably the largest conference for B2B marketing.

The clear and unambiguous result: the thesis is wrong. Emotional factors must also be addressed - even in the B2B field - in order to be truly effective and successful. All the more so if you want to retain customers in the long term. And every marketing manager knows that retaining customers is far less expensive than acquiring new ones.

Another speaker at the BMA, the marketing manager of CISCO, brought the matter to a head: B2B decisions are much more emotional than everyday B2C decisions. That's because there are very often big risks associated with them, which can lead to career setbacks and even job loss. This is why it is so important in B2B to turn companies into distinctive brand personalities. Brands mean trust, and trust is quite an emotional matter.

The marketing manager of AON underlined this: even a reinsurer that is per se committed to numerical arguments is much more successful if emotions are also addressed. Even science - especially brain research today not only supports number theses, but it also helps to prove emotional influences. For a reinsurer, of course, obvious to sell fears and anger, but also all other emotions, beauty and colors and joy and feelings of happiness.