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As we prepare for our B2B and B2G branding course later this month we've been
doing additional research and analysis of the business and government markets that is leading us
to look at branding with a deeper perspective. Branding is much talked about and little
understood, even by experienced marketers because it is complex, combining both tangible and
intangible elements. In the B2B environment, because there are more players on both the selling
side and the buying side, this complexity becomes even more daunting. In snooping around
brand paradigms we've been looking for good ways to deconstruct these challenges for the
course, and while there's a lot of 'brand stuff' out there, we're focusing on the core aspects of
brand-building that are executed through the marketing plan: Brand Experience, Brand Trigger
and Brand Perception.

In our analysis, the secret to brand-building around an authentic brand is to value Experience as
much as Trigger and Perception and to view them as holistically related. This emphasis on Brand
Experience is especially important in a Web 2.0 world where your audience participates in co-
creating their own Brand Experience with you. But this focus doesn't always come easily to
many marketers, whose budgets are wrapped around the creation and measurement of Triggers
and Perception, but it has always been the secret to powerful brand-building. In the B2B and
B2G spaces particularly, Brand Experience is critically important and complex.

In our research I thought I'd come upon a great paradigm a few weeks ago on the
MarketingProf's Daily Fix blog when I read Paul Williams' Think Reputation Instead of Brand
post. It's a great article about how to think of brand-building as building your own or your
company's reputation (and it's got a great list of resources). I read it thinking, "Wow, this is
great! I agree with him!" But I kept getting hung up on his metaphor in comparing a j
 with a

 
It bugged me for over a week and I think I've finally figured out why.

If a brand was little more than a reputation, our brand fate would always be in the hands of
others. But in fact, it's not in their hands, it's in ours and in their relationship with us.

Paul is absolutely right that a brand is a difficult concept to comprehend, much less manage. And
he's also right that reputation is a primary factor in evaluating how your brand is perceived,
however we don't think you should stop there in trying to understand and shape your company's
brand. Why? Because to speak of a brand as strictly an external phenomenon in terms of how
your company is perceived by others skews the balance too heavily on Perception. A thing
cannot be perceived unless it exists in the first place, is understood as a holistic entity and
(finally) is perceived. And so branding must be examined in three parts:

º 



 Your company or product/service must be experienced by audiences in
order for it to have a reputation and an identity for them. What is the sum total of your audiences'
experience with your company? In person? On the phone? With your product or service? In
writing? In visual media? In interactive media? In social media? What does your stakeholder
touchpoint analysis tell you about the frequency and quality of those experiences? Make sure you
include all the stakeholders and players in your audience and your company, which in a B2B or
B2G organizational sale can be a lot of people!

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 For an audience to associate a brand with its experience you must create
trigger stimuli (e.g., logos, tag lines, spokespeople, methodologies, user paradigms, specialized
vocabulary etc.) that unify all their brand experience in #1 above in the audiences' mind. What
triggers do you give your audience to associate your brand name with their experience? Are the
triggers deployed consistently and frequently enough to stimulate the association each time it is
encountered?

 


An experience which becomes associated with your brand leaves a
perception in the mind of the audience. For it to become a lasting perception it has to be notable.
For it to become a trusted brand you have to leave perceptions of most importance to your
audience. As marketers we do spend a lot of energy trying to understand how we are perceived
(e.g., market research and brand awareness studies) and it gives us important information about
how Experience really translates. Armed with a in-depth understanding of Perception, we can
more effectively fine-tune the Experience and Triggers. This process of refinement should
consume the majority of our time when we're not launching new initiatives and beginning this
cycle all over again.

We will come back to this three-way construct many times in future posts and in our course
materials because these are three important lenses through which to build a branding program for
any audience. For the business or government audience in an organizational sale, these three
lenses provide focus for the marketing department to work with other departments on developing
the experience (product development, account management, customer/technical support,
implementation/operations, sales), communicating the trigger (all of the above plus
communications and public relations) and measuring the perception (all of the above plus
research).

And there's the rub. The brand is a result of activity that is

managed by groups far beyond the marketing department. Every marketer knows the frustration
of being held accountable to "impossible" objectives, the execution of which are beyond their
control as they try to construct the puzzle of public perception. [Notice we did not join the hew
and cry of some of you readers when you thought "sales!" since if we did we would just
engender an answering wail of "marketing!" and this post is not about that.]

In our experience most B2B companies really don't "get" this holistic brand paradigm in which it
is the whole company working together to create the brand and manage it. Most company
executives still think of branding as "marketing's job" and while a good CMO or VP should be a
major brand leader internally, it's the CEO in the end that has managerial oversight over all the
organizations (internally and externally) that create the brand experience.

Here lies a major opportunity for B2B and B2G companies to improve their market position via
branding, by looking at "employee and customer satisfaction" through a brand lens, which is
fundamentally deeper and richer than scorecards and surveys they are used to using. It's also a
new way to think of evaluating "Brand ROI" by factoring in more than sales and revenue
numbers. The cost of ignoring this opportunity is high and even the big brands get caught more
visibly now, thanks to the talkback nature of social media. (If you're not familiar with Dell Hell,
read up!). The ability for employees and customers to surface the ugly underbelly of their Brand
Experience outside of scorecards and surveys has made every company vulnerable to branding
efforts which are too focused on Triggers and Perception and not focused enough on Experience.

Watch for future posts where we dive more deeply into this paradigm and develop specific
approaches to managing the entire program across Experience, Trigger and Perception. We'll
also talk about how to educate your executive team as to the important role they play in building
and managing the brand.