Brand Marketing for B2B CMOs

[00:00:00] Dozie Anyaegbunam: This is one of those times when you say, yeah, B2B is boring. B2C is not boring.

Um, but, but yeah, welcome everyone to, to this. Um, this is the first of our communities event series, where what we look to do is basically speak to SMEs and explore topics. I mean, all you, for me, the way I think of this is I’m an extremely curious human. And the goal is I’m Jamie on this journey of.

Exploring a particular topic. Today we’re exploring brand and why? Because. Everyone talks about brands, brand versus performance, brand is not for B2B, brand versus brand. And, you know, so we’re happy for you to join us today and kind of get this going. Um, for those of you who don’t know, my name is Josie Anebunam, I’m the senior editor of the CMO, which is, it’s a career media publication that’s [00:01:00] focused on B2B SaaS businesses, specifically B2B SaaS CMOs, senior marketing leaders who are looking to grow your business, do better in marketing.

So we basically create content that helps you get better at your job. So please join us, sign up, read our content. Um, to this session, we’re just talking about brand marketing for B2B CMOs. And, um, over time we’ll be speaking with top, top leaders in the space. But today with me, I have Liam. Um, Liam Moroney is the co founder of Storybook, um, is the CEO of storybook to his, basically it’s a brand marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies.

And before starting storybook, which is what I found, I find this is what I find interesting about his career is he literally walked in demand gen and performance marketing for like 15 years. And he comes out of that and goes on a rail and says, yo folks, we need to do brand[00:02:00]

[00:02:04] Liam Moroney: discovery there for sure.

[00:02:06] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Oh, are you serious? You want to talk about that a bit?

So we’ll get started in a second, but honestly, um, I would love to hear where everyone is coming tuning in from. Um, you could just say, take a second, say hi in the chat and just kind of type like where you’re, where you’re chatting from. You know,

I’ll probably just say I’m typing. I’ll type where I’m from. I’m tuning in from. Oh, better. Oh, we’ve got DC Washington, Washington, Toronto. SFO, San Francisco. Oh, wow. We’re covering the spread. Aren’t we? Look at Los Angeles. Oh, that’s good. Oh, that looks good. Um, so while we’re [00:03:00] getting that in London, oh, that’s interesting.

Um, while we’re getting that in just some housekeeping, this has been recorded. Um, and we’ll be available for everyone who signed up later. Um, we also, we might also share clips of these on our website and social channels. If for some reason you don’t want to show up, um in the recording, you know I mean, first off is that your cameras are turned off.

Your Microsoft microphones are off by default, but if for some reason, so don’t worry about your recording. If for some reason that happens, we’ll probably do some editing to get that out of the way. Um, while this is going on, you can ask any questions you have along the way. Um, because really this is not, um, where Liam has like a full slide and he’s talking about brand.

It’s literally, you’re a curious editor, ask him all the questions. And if you put in more questions, um, Michael, who’s our moderator will kind of help to get Bring them to my attention and then I can add them to, to what I’m saying. Now let’s get into it because I guess we are out of [00:04:00] time. Say with brand, y’all is out of time.

So I think for me, um, yeah, is. The first thing for me basically is the past couple of, I think it’s like the past 12 months, you know, with the, with the dawn of the zip era, which is basically everyone is finding how to raise money. And then, so B2B businesses have to kind of think a bit more about like how are we spending money?

How are we raising money? How are we acquiring customers? It feels like we’ve come into this very interesting debate about brand versus performance. And I feel like if you’ve spent the past one year, just basically educating. Us on LinkedIn about like why you think we need to take a, a pattern, look at what brand can do for us.

And I’ve also seen the other side of the conversation where people go like, no, B2B brand doesn’t exactly work for B2B. Um, yes, the, where they say [00:05:00] brand versus brand, this is just a ton of really interesting things going on there. Some of it frustrating, to be honest. Um, but I, I think I’ll just kind of start off with, um, What do you, what do people think brand marketing is and why is that wrong?

Like maybe, maybe like, what is the, what’s the wrong notion? We all care about brand, which is why it feels like in B2B, especially there’s just this tension once you bring the word brand marketing into the conversation.

[00:05:34] Liam Moroney: So I think there’s, there’s two different parts to that answer. I think one is that.

When we think of brand, we do think of it through a B2C consumer lens, and that tends to color it a lot. So, we think of brands that we know, we buy from, we love, we think of things like Apple, we think of, you know, sort of Nike’s, all the Super Bowl commercial, that, that’s what comes to mind when a lot of us think of brand.

And [00:06:00] so that feels like it is an impossibly, uh, Irrelevant thing in B2B and I think it’s because we’re thinking of one type of brand and we’ll get to kind of walk the other version of it as a B2B. So I think it just doesn’t feel like it fits in that world. But I think the other big part of it is that there’s also a very big.

Negative connotation when it comes to brand, because it’s often been used in B2B, especially B2B tech and SAS as the, uh, well, I didn’t generate any results, but it was for brand. So it gets kind of like the bookish that all the unmeasurable stuff falls into. And that gives it this sort of association of, well, that’s the wasted spend.

That’s the unpredictable spend. And a lot of what has happened in SAS over the last year. 10, 15, 20 years has been this ruthless pursuit of measurability and predictability. And that just doesn’t jive very well with brand,

[00:06:59] Dozie Anyaegbunam: you know, [00:07:00] just, just the demon called attribution, which I think is good and which I think is bad.

And maybe, maybe the follow up on that is like, I hear you when you say to me, Oh, like people is all the B2C stuff at the B2C examples. So maybe, maybe a question is, is there any B2B brand that you think is doing B2, is doing brand marketing really well, or more of like, are there B2B brands that have explored brand marketing and have done some really good stuff in the market in the past, let’s say 10 years, you know, so that there’s some, there’s a huge sample size.

[00:07:46] Liam Moroney: So there definitely are B2B brands who are doing great marketing. I think where we often get a little bit confused is B2B is a massive category. So we often think of like who in tech B2B, because the truth is that a [00:08:00] lot of B2B by definition is probably not seen by the mass audiences because they talk to very specific segments.

So there can be very effective companies doing what feels right. It’s like very boring marketing ’cause it’s not for you. Mass consumer B2B advertising is easy to be a judge on because it’s designed to kinda appeal to as many people as possible. But you know, you go everywhere from B2B, you could count, you know, GlaxoSmithKline in that category.

You could count UPS in that category. You could count Salesforce in that. Like, so the, the span of who in B2B is massive, but I think if you narrow it down to B2B Tech. Like, you know, Salesforce was doing terrific marketing for a very, very long time. I mean, to the point, like, their brand marketing, they have skyscrapers in leading cities.

Like, they, they have developed an association. It might be changing now, but they certainly owned the entire category for a very long time, and brand played a massive role in that. So I think it’s just, It doesn’t feel as [00:09:00] tangible because it’s so designed for specific audiences. So as marketers, we often look at who in MarTech is doing really good marketing.

Cause you can relate to us, but there are really good brands doing brand marketing to audiences that just, it’s just very irrelevant to us. That’s why it doesn’t feel like it’s that visible.

[00:09:19] Dozie Anyaegbunam: And you raised an interesting point that. I feel like it’s one of the objections you hear all the time, which is, Oh, it feels like brand A’s for, you know, big businesses, you know, who have, who has, who they have the budget to drive.

Could this sort of conversations or, or do those kinds of tactics. And let me call that out already. So you don’t call me out on that is it feels like, you know, because maybe part of that is because B2C. Is the example we always use as the filter or the filter we used to look at brand marketing. And so we think big, so, Oh, big, [00:10:00] like B2C.

So these are the brands doing that, you know, but any thoughts on that in terms of like, that, that shouldn’t be an objection when you’re thinking about brand. It’s a

[00:10:09] Liam Moroney: valid concern to be a small company saying I can’t afford to do big scale advertising efforts because that’s just not where we are. But I think that’s, that’s not necessarily the only thing that matters in brand.

At the end of the day, I think the important thing is that brand is reputation and reputation matters immensely. There are lots of ways that you can try to impact your reputation. At the end of the day, The very important thing is none of us own our brand, the brand belongs to the market and the buyers because it’s their perception of us, it’s their beliefs, their associations, what we can control is how do we try and influence that to the best of our abilities, how can we put our best foot forward and it’s equally a brand marketing effort to be Doing partnerships and associating yourselves with companies that will help boost your awareness, that you can [00:11:00] piggyback on their reputation.

Like it doesn’t just mean. Mass advertising, TV commercials out of home, that’s advertising. That’s comms. It’s all part of a brand effort, but it’s not, it’s not reasonable. I think to say we’re not doing brand marketing until we’re running TV ads. Like you’re always trying to improve your reputation in many, many ways.

This is a brand marketing effort. I’m working with you. You’re working with me. We’re all borrowing from everyone’s brand equity and reach. That’s all brand marketing.

[00:11:31] Dozie Anyaegbunam: I like that actually. I like that because you know how we’re. When I moved from B2C to B2B, you kept seeing, I kept seeing this conversation around, once you talked about brand, it always felt like people talked about the ad agencies and it’s about, Oh, advertising, Oh, you’re doing an ad campaign.

And I never had the answer for that, actually. I mean, I wonder if you have like any answer that kind of, I mean, you, [00:12:00] I feel like you talked about it a bit, but like, is there like a, an answer that says, Hey, when we talk about brand and ad campaign is just one of the

[00:12:13] Liam Moroney: And an ad campaign solves One of the biggest problems with all companies, which is nobody buys from companies they’ve never heard of.

Advertising agencies are one way of trying to break through the noise and get people to remember who you are. People go to ad agencies for their creativity and their understanding of channels and audiences, because it taps into a skill that they very often don’t have internally. There’s a reason people go to Ogilvy.

There’s a reason people go to Saatchi and Saatchi. They want something memorable. And they’re tapping into their creative skills, but that’s one aspect. Like, I think a big part of brand marketing is you have to understand how you actually influence people thinking of you, remembering you. Creativity is one huge component of it.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] Dozie Anyaegbunam: And which is, which kind of leads to my next question. I mean, this, this, there’s a post I saw you comment on LinkedIn, saying Shahabat Ali, which is where he says brand is not a marketing exercise. And when I first read that. I first had this initial reaction, like what does he mean? And then you read through the post and you’re like, Oh yeah, that actually makes sense.

But I would love for you to kind of expand on that because I feel like that, that is a really good way to kind of explore what does brand really should, or what should brand actually mean to a B2B SaaS company? Like, I feel like that’s a really good way to kind of explore that. Yeah.

[00:13:39] Liam Moroney: Yeah. And I think the way I would approach it is.

When you think about like, why are you investing in brand? Why are you doing, why are you putting any focus or attention on it? It’s because it is one of the biggest aspects of how people make decisions. People in B2B are not as rational as we would like to believe there. There’s this common perception that we’re highly [00:14:00] logical, present us with the facts.

We will buy the best option. And that sounds really nice and in theory, but in practice, it’s not. There’s enormous amounts of risk goes into buying anything on behalf of a company. Because what if it doesn’t work? You’re on the hook for that decision. So you’re making choices where you’re weighing how risky is this?

How much do I want to bet my reputation on this? You get other people involved where now you’ve got to try and like get a committee to agree. And what you always end up with is compromise because you can’t reasonably go through every option of ways to solve the problem. You’d spend forever looking for solutions.

So what people do in both B2C and B2B is they take shortcuts. The economic term is satisfying, which is that you’re not, you know, Satisfying the best option. You’re compromising. You’re doing a combination of both. You’re looking for the best, least risky choice. And the best way of doing that is by thinking, who do I already know?

[00:15:00] Who have I heard of? Who seems to be the leader? Who does everybody else have? And then you make decisions based on that. So brand is for a lot of buyers is a helpful way of saying, I know what you do. I have a good sense of who you do it for. You have a reputation that helps me make a decision with more certainty.

So brand is, it’s a cheat code for buyers as much as it is an asset for the companies themselves because it is a way of narrowing down choice. Um, and a very B to C example, but I think a very valid B to C example is the average amount of products in a U. S. Supermarket is about 30, 000 products. Now, none of us couldn’t think of 30, 000 products.

And when you walk through, when you look at the stats, and again, I know this is B2C, but it’s a good way of visualizing it. The data, when they watch people go through a supermarket, going up and down aisles, the average amount of time that they spend in each aisle [00:16:00] picking the items is about 12 seconds. So something is going on where they are.

Completely eliminating 99 percent of what’s in that store. They’re scanning. They’re looking for the color of the product. They know they’re looking for the logo that they recognize and they just zero in on and pick it. It’s the very same, just in a different way and B2B where we are eliminating all of the noise and narrowing it down to a convenient list and that’s brand.

[00:16:28] Dozie Anyaegbunam: You know, you just reminded me of a story. So this is a Nigerian story. So, I mean, um, forgive me everyone, but it’s so, so what brand does to you? Um, while I was doing my MBA, so it is, it was, I had played soccer in the evening, I got back home. I was hungry. Now there’s this massive eatery. It’s just similar, like how you have Tim Hortons in Canada here or McDonald’s in the U S and McDonald’s [00:17:00] here too.

They were called Mr. Biggs. Like I absolutely hate their food. Like I absolutely hate their food, but I was hungry it was 8 p. m Now for some reason when I stepped out of my house and said I need to go find food The only thing I could remember in that moment was Mr. Biggs, Mr. Biggs. Now I went to Mr. Biggs.

I don’t like their food, but I bought it. I came back home the next day I drove down the road again, and then I saw that there was an eatery beside Mr. Big’s that I know about, but for some reason, the night before, Just because Mr. Digs has been in the market much longer, their brand codes are almost like the way Tesco brand codes are.

Like you saw the latest Tesco brand code campaign. It’s almost like crazy right now in Nigeria. Like that was the only thing that I could think of. I somehow. I couldn’t [00:18:00] think of the other brand. Like I did, I did not think about it. The next time I’m like, wait, what just happened here? Actually. Like I did not see it.

I drove past it, walked into Mr. Big’s, bought food, went home. Then the next day I come out of my brand coma. That’s what I call it. Every time I think about that, like, and I feel like that’s the same way brands act with us, whether we are B2B, whether we are B2C and, and probably just kind of continue it. It probably a good way to think about it is the new research that I’ve been seeing with by Sixth Sense and Bain and Google about how B2B businesses spend 70 percent of the journey, just learning about the brand in a space where we can attribute, we don’t have control about unless you’re literally talking to their constitutional set.

[00:18:51] Liam Moroney: That Sixth Sense research was fascinating, and I, it’s one of the best B2B reports I think I’ve seen in a long time. By the way, Sixth Sense also does really good [00:19:00] marketing credit to them. The, the thing that was really interesting in that Sixth Sense report was that when people came in markets, so they gave like sample dates of, In their, their average buying cycle was about 11 and a half months.

And when people came in at that, the very start of that buying, and when the group came together and said, let’s decide on who we’re going to go with, they already had a set of accounts. So the people they thought of as their immediate day one consideration set were brands they were already familiar with.

They’d already used in the past. They consultant came in. So even before they start buying, there’s this idea that I think we mistaken B2B where we think it’s this like zero moment where like, I need to buy who sells this. It’s just not how it works. They already have something in mind in most cases. And so at the start of that, then they had somewhere between like an average of about five brands in their consideration set, but really they had like a top one or two.[00:20:00]

And of that list, when they went through their 11 and a half month cycle, firstly, eight months of that was them just going through validating are these the right five? Are there others we should think of making sure we’ve got all of our ducks in a row? So they were doing their research. And then the last three months was the sales process of all of that.

About 80 percent of the time, they went with whoever was top of the list 11 and a half months ago. So most of that decision is, and Kerry Cunningham, who was one of the authors of this report, told me this, it’s confirmation bias on the parts of the buyers. They’re, they’ve got a good feeling that this is the right one.

And a lot of it is just hope I’m right. So a lot of it’s just them carrying that all the way through the process, which tells you that this really wasn’t a logical buying process. They weren’t evaluating and doing checklists. Most of that happens at the end. Most of that, like this is argument on LinkedIn that I don’t love, which is like the Garner magic quadrant is of [00:21:00] no value.

That’s not true. It’s generally not how people develop a consideration session, but you can be sure it’s how they get their boss to sign off on it at the end. It’s all part of just the like de risking, de risking, de risking, but the list was developed at the start in almost all cases, and the ones who are at the top of that list won in almost all cases.

[00:21:21] Dozie Anyaegbunam: You know why this is so wild to think about? I mean, because it kind of ties into what you said earlier on about Um, all you’re just doing, all they are doing at the latest stage of the buying process is basically just, Oh, talking to the folks in the community, convincing them, playing all the politics they need to get the budget signed up, you know, aligning everybody on the team.

That’s the productive one. They know what they want, you know, and God forgive your brand. If two or three of them, like you’re like one brand ahead of yours, you’re not winning that, like no matter what you do, you’re not really winning that, you know, [00:22:00] Now that we’re talking about this, I think, and now that you’ve mentioned the, the LinkedIn argument, I want to now talk about, you know, what, what, what I, I don’t want to say the word bad, but probably I’m going to say it, but like bad marketing practices, you know, we’ve adopted in B2B over time, which is basically just feels like acronyms, creating Ps, you know, and stuff like thoughts on that.

Like, I w I really want to hear you talk about that because. I have my frustrations.

[00:22:35] Liam Moroney: So I think there’s, God, there’s about a million ways you could start this thought, but I think, you know, I always try to come at it from a place of being empathetic and sympathetic, like most people who are coming up with ideas and acronyms and models and methodologies that they’re generally well intentioned.

People are just trying to find a better repeatable, predictable way of doing things. The first thing, and I, I know I’m not alone in this feeling is that, you know, [00:23:00] We lack fundamental marketing training in the industry. It’s not the fault of marketers, but it is the fault of the industry. There’s a general lack of understanding of just core principles of marketing.

And there’s also kind of a weird. I don’t want to call it a chip on our shoulders, but this sort of like, Oh, stuff from a textbook in the eighties has no relevance type idea. And I think there’s a couple of things at play here. One of them is that, and I’m very much a tech startup industry. That was where all of my career was.

We have a innovator, disruptive mindset. It’s who we are. It’s who we always aspire to be. So we love inventing. We love coming up with new, we love better. But there are core principles in marketing that are true, whether we know them or not. Like sometimes things just happen because that’s how consumer behavior is set up.

That’s how generally like people buy things. And the more you understand them, the more you’re insulated from ideas that sound very plausible until you peel [00:24:00] them back. And then you realize that that’s just not how the world works. It’s like, it’s math in a vacuum. Lead scoring was one of the worst examples for a long time, where we Believed you could get someone in you show them enough things and you’ll walk them to the logical conclusion that yep I want this.

Here’s my money. And again, it sounds very very plausible But it’s just not reality. And I think a lot of what happens in marketing is we come up with these very logical Plausible ideas that don’t meet reality when they have to. And I think, you know, we intense signals is one of the more recent ones where we think if only I knew who was in market, I could go and sell to them, but now go back to that six cents report, you’re dealing with the reality that by the time they’re showing their head in market, their decisions made, it’s just that understanding of it’s more important to understand the core rules of how people buy, how people make decisions, how people psychologically think of brands, and then.

How do you build strategy with some of the core rules of marketing? Those are [00:25:00] just fundamental rules that help you stay within guardrails of reality.

[00:25:08] Dozie Anyaegbunam: You know, um, it’s, it’s interesting because just, just the part which I find interesting, which is the four Ps and B2B, like, I feel like for me, like that is the, almost feels like that’s the, the one where we all seem to just go off once we get there. So we either say, no, the four Ps don’t matter because in B2B, The product is run by the product marketing team, you know, all we, we don’t have place because well, you know, we walk from an office and then we now literally go sell to the customer and then come back and then everything goes through.

I think what I want you to help me explore there is B2B is obviously very different from B2C in terms of the [00:26:00] buying journey. And so how do we look at those four P’s with a B2B lenses? Because it feels like, again, back to what you said earlier on, it seems like what’s always happening to us is we always take the B2C thinking.

And say, Oh, this is why it’s not working because this is how he works in B2C. And this is why I think you shouldn’t walk because I’m doing the same thing in B2B.

[00:26:25] Liam Moroney: So the four Ps are funny because I think we, you know, I went to college for marketing, like it was drilled into us. You couldn’t start anything without a four P strategy and you talk in B2C and they do the exact same thing where I think to your point about marketing doesn’t own some of those aspects.

Is owning. Things like product and price and place doesn’t mean you can’t do a four piece strategy. There are two different things. Yes, it is common in B2C for marketing to actually be releasing products, designing them. Obviously that’s not the way it is in B2B generally, but a [00:27:00] four piece strategy.

Simplest is applying all of those aspects of understanding to the strategy. And what I mean by that is like a one piece strategy, a PR, like a promotion only strategy, which is generally what we do. If you’re promoting something that is. Too expensive. It’s not going to work. If you’re promoting it in ways people don’t like to buy, it’s not going to work.

If you’re promoting it at places, they don’t actually go and find these products. It’s not going to work. And I think what we often find in marketing is we feel a little bit defenseless where I don’t have control over these variables. All I can control is the promotion. But. A lot of what goes along really well with the four P’s is understanding that comes from thinking in those ways.

What I mean by that is, if you’re taking product as an example, we often as marketers, especially in SaaS, we get the information about what matters to the audience from the product team and from the sales team. Now, Those are biased in very meaningful [00:28:00] ways. Product is talking to customers who always want more stuff.

So they’ve already taken the features that they use for granted and they want the new ones. So you can over index on thinking those features are more important. Then there and sales is in a very late stage conversation where they’re talking at a very tactical feature level between you and competitors.

But if you pull way, way back, and this data generally is true across almost all B2C and B2B, most people care about a few core things. So if you asked the general market, Hey, if you’re buying a marketing automation platform, what are the things that matter the most to you? They’re probably not going to say, Hey, you know, AI sidekick stuff, which is what you’ll hear from your product team.

They’ll probably say, I want it to, you know, be easy to use. I want the logins. I don’t want to have to pay for multiple seats. I want to make sure that it’s like, again, there are generally it’s the information you get from the market is much more valuable than the information you get from bias sources.

This applies to the rest of us. Marketing’s job. At its core, a CMO’s job is to [00:29:00] represent the voice of the customer. And you do that by talking to the market and learning from the market. How much do people want to pay for this? How much are they willing to? How would they prefer to buy this? Where would they expect By this, and all of that is a four piece strategy, just informing what you know about the market into a proper strategy, maybe you can’t change the price of the product, but you can at least come back to the product and sales team and say, here’s what we know about the market, because the last thing I’ll say about it is that when we don’t do a four piece strategy, all of our information is coming from.

People who are talking to customers and prospects who’ve already heard of us and have already gone to the stage of coming into a conversation with us, which means you’re not talking to the people who’ve never heard of you, who decided not to come into a sales conversation with you. And that’s the majority of the market.

So we’re, we’re biasing our data to the smallest portion of our audience.

[00:29:56] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Because we’re kind of running out of time. I’m, I’m, I think actually this is a good [00:30:00] time to kind of move to the part about like, so what does brand marketing really mean for B2B SaaS? I know, I hear you talk a lot about category entry points, and I feel like that’s a good thing to kind of talk about. Now that we’re talking, you know, you just mentioned the fact that we spend most of the time talking to an audience that is either, has already been pre designed in a way or it’s products or it’s sales, you know, so like, how do we, As B2B marketers, how do we explore or how do we actually start talking about?

Agreeing about brand marketing. So

[00:30:36] Liam Moroney: I think brand marketing strategy is, it’s a blueprint for how you can best set yourself up to be thought of. So category entry points is one of those examples, which is what are the different moments people think of something that you do? Like, you know, a good example is like a HR platform, like, We would typically default to doing demand gen where we’re saying top five reasons to choose this type of vendor [00:31:00] and buyer’s guides.

But at the end of the day, people think of a specific type of solution in specific moments. They might be thinking, I’ve got all of this hybrid workforce. We’re doing return to office. And I don’t think my systems are set up to be able to come. That’s a category entry point. You want people to think of you in as many of those moments as they possibly can so that they, when they have that moment, when they’re developing the consideration sesh, you’re in the day one.

So a lot of it is a blueprint of how do people buy this product? What moments do you come up and then how do you use that to build a strategy? Is it like, where’s your level of awareness? How much should you be placing on just broad reach in the market versus how should you be focusing on specific segments?

Really at the end of the day, that’s what brand marketing is. It’s just a blueprint to try and position yourself at the right moments to the right audiences, and then everything beyond that then is tactics. What content do we want to do? How do we be creative about it? And the other one other aspect of it is how do you make sure that you’re consistent in [00:32:00] all of this?

Because the biggest problem in brand marketing is that people forget and they don’t notice. So cutting through the noise is a creative endeavor. How do you make sure you’re. Breaking through, how do you make sure you’re standing out? How do you make sure your brand is consistent? That’s most of what brand marketing strategy is.

Everything else is just how it materializes to your specific audience.

[00:32:22] Dozie Anyaegbunam: You know, so I have a question around brand versus demand, but I’m. I absolutely want to ask this because when you talked about consistency and brand, and I know back then, yeah, back then in the B2C world and marketing school, you know, I used to hear you need to talk to someone seven times before they literally, um, recognize that you exist.

And I don’t know what it is like now, considering the, how social media has flattened everything and the amount of noise we have to deal with, but I wonder. What your thoughts are on B2B is a really interesting space in the sense [00:33:00] that I feel like a lot of the things we do are based off how we are funded and the incentives, how we grow, um, the fact that you want to grow fast for a bit.

And then at some point you probably say, I’m now, I’m now a series C business. And so I can probably think about brand, but then we look at all this data and it’s, it shows that like probably There’s no more this, we don’t, we can’t afford that, that much, you know? So I’m just curious, consistency versus dealing with all the pressures that’s coming from the investors, the market.

Yeah, I

[00:33:38] Liam Moroney: have a couple of thoughts. I think the first thing is that brand was always important. The reason it’s a money more important now is because suddenly people have to be a lot more efficient with the money that they’re spending. It turns out if you’re willing to burn lots of capital in the pursuit of growth, you can be very inefficient and it can work.

And a lot of people did that for a lot of years. So you were able to do performance marketing. I’d a ridiculous clip [00:34:00] losing money on every customer that you got, because that was the strategy, the growth at all costs. Now you hear these kinds of different angles where Sam Jacobs, for example, CEO of pavilion, he started to present these arguments about when do you bootstrap and when do you go for VC funding?

Because it depends. I think it’s not one or the other. There are markets where massive growth is important. Open AI is a perfect example of that. They’re spending. Ungodly amounts of money because it is a race and they know that there is a time window that you have to just be everywhere. It was true for Uber.

It was true for a lot of brands, but for a lot of companies, responsible growth can happen in a much more efficient way. Brand is still important in both. It’s just, it’s about, it’s about pace of growth. It’s about a levels of aggression and growth, but at the end of the day, reputation still matters. You can’t run, I run a bad product.

You can’t run, I run a bad reputation. Yeah.

[00:34:54] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it feels like that patience is key. Cause it feels like [00:35:00] Australia B2B tech, especially like it just feels like once you get in there, the conversation, the conversation is around how fast do you grow, you know, and it feels like performance marketing, you know, fits that, like you just, you know, spend, just spend, spend on Google and you get all the leads and you sell to a couple of them and your revenue keeps growing every month and then everything’s fine.

And then you probably grow up and then you have to probably sell to someone because your fundamentals just kind of mean that. You really have no business that is sustainable, like.

[00:35:30] Liam Moroney: Yeah, but it’s worth pointing out. There was a very unnatural thing in SAS for a long time, where a lot of founders were only in it for as short as they had to be.

The goal was to flip the company to somebody else. Nobody cares about brand. If you’ve got a two, five year time horizon. So it creates very unnatural incentives. Brand is an investment into the future. You have to believe you’ll be in the future in order to make that investment. So I think a lot of that was just, there was a lot of unnatural, For lack of a better term, gambling going on where people were trying to build a [00:36:00] company, grow it as fast as possible, and then let somebody else figure out how to make it profitable.

That’s not obviously a healthy way to grow any business. But if you have a real plan to be around for 10, 20, 30 years, then the benefits of investing in brand are the price elasticity changes. You can charge more. You don’t have to discount as much. Your win rates go up. Like it’s a bet into the future.

That’s ultimately what it is. Yeah.

[00:36:23] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah. I like the term unnatural gambling, actually, because yeah, that’s what he felt like, you know, just grow fast, sell to someone. And then if you go, the other person has to figure out how to, how to make the business profitable. But then the funny part of it all is that you, the person, the founder becomes known as a second time founder and is able to quickly.

[00:36:45] Liam Moroney: Serial entrepreneur should not be something you post about. That just means you’ve got a short attention span.

[00:36:51] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah, I have, I have a question here, which is a fun question. Robert says it’s a fun question for you. He says, what’s the number one most egregious [00:37:00] belief that marketers have about B2B buyer behavior?

That is completely right. I

[00:37:05] Liam Moroney: think there’s, there’s two of them that I’m not sure I could put one above the other. One is that we have the ability to create a demand for something that is, I see it all the time. It’s a common one that if only I, if only I showed you what I could do, I could show you, you need this and you need this now that doesn’t really work, especially in B2B.

You, you don’t buy things to solve problems you don’t have. And this idea that we can make you aware of a problem you didn’t know was a problem. If someone’s unaware of the problem, it’s not a problem. Simple as that. So I think that one is, it just doesn’t work in reality. Alongside that is the idea that we can move people to being ready.

All of the data, Gartner, the, the Pavilion ones, especially things that came out of the Sixth Sense report, the timing is up to them. It always was when they are ready, they will make that choice. The best we can ever achieve is maybe moving them forward a couple of days or [00:38:00] weeks earlier than they planned.

But at the end of the day, this is where I think this idea of an MQL and lead scoring, there’s no pressure point. There’s no amount of ads. There’s no, like even the rule of seven. Rule of seven is generally fictional. There’s no data to support that. It’s real. None whatsoever. It was made up in the thirties from a guy who wanted to sell more ad space.

And that was his way of doing it. Oh, there is no way. There’s no good evidence out there saying, if I just show you 10 ads or 20, I’ll make you more convinced. You can’t make people do what they’re not going to do. Marketing is a generally weak force. All we’re able to do is change the propensity that you’ll think of us over something else.

[00:38:42] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah. You know why I couldn’t stop laughing when you talked about the first belief was I know I read something recently where someone said the biggest businesses over the past couple of years were big because they had markets where there was large pent up demand. [00:39:00] And I read it and I just knew I was like, I don’t have the full scope to fully answer this, but I think you’re actually wrong.

I don’t think he works like that, you know, but. I’m just going to

[00:39:11] Liam Moroney: latent demand. I could talk forever on this idea of late demand there. There’s very little evidence to say you could sustain an entire business off of latent demand. There are no untapped underground reservoirs of demand out there. And if there is like it’s someone who was coming along to solve that problem, like they may come along from time to time, there are examples of things that might be a good example of latent demand.

You could argue that Netflix originally was a version of latent demand. And. You know, like, um, where people who may not have ever wanted to go into a blockbuster would have bought from someone if they only made it more convenient and Netflix came along and offered DVDs. But again, it wasn’t the majority of the business.

Most of the business came from stealing business from blockbuster or stealing business from, uh, direct television. Like it’s, you’re always stealing from demand that [00:40:00] exists somewhere else.

[00:40:01] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah, yeah. I get that. I get that. I mean, when you think about it from the point of are you, are you going for crude oil or something like

[00:40:12] Liam Moroney: it’s the innovator mindset.

I think we think that if we simply came up with something, we could invent it. And a lot of sass, unfortunately, is solutions in desperate search of a problem to solve. And then they all have.

[00:40:25] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Yeah, yeah. Um, One last question before we move to the close, which is thanks, Chris, by the way, I moved my mic too far from me.

I got so excited listening to Malaya when I moved my mic away from me. Um, there’s this thing about is brand marketing here to replace demand generation? Um, can they work together? Should they work together? I do think that debate shouldn’t be had. Um, but I think it’s important. We talk about it because then you see things like people saying performance, branding, marketing.

I’m like, what are you talking about? Like we’ve created another term again, you know, um, but [00:41:00] like thoughts on that and yeah.

[00:41:03] Liam Moroney: All of the data that says that you have to do long term and short term marketing in every category, you know, the Field and Burnett type models, like they work together. Brand marketing is effective.

It works to change opinions and perspectives and performance marketing is where it gets efficient. That’s how you make sure you’re not just blasting money out the door. So like they do balance each other out. I think in the. Where does demand set? It depends on how you define demand generation, and that has changed a lot.

It used to be very bottom of funnel, and I think it has a very strong place there where I think it’s gotten dangerous was a lot of what we talk about his demand generation today is an attempt to do brand marketing, but through a demand generation lens. So this is a I want to do long term marketing because I think we all recognize that it’s the The need, but I’m going to only measure it through my multi touch attribution tool and through the amount of pipeline that I generated, you’re only going to set that up for failure.

So I think it’s, it’s one part of it, but it has to work [00:42:00] alongside it. The two of them work together for sure.

[00:42:05] Dozie Anyaegbunam: Thank you. Honestly, thank you. Cause I think, I think I can get into some of these conversations about branding a bit better now. Um, folks, honestly, the next. Next four or five weeks, we’ll be, we’ll do this again. And this time around, we’ll talk about brand versus demand. Like more, we’ll talk about that more.

Um, and where we’ll talk, we’ll explore like, how do you shift from demand gen to brand marketing? Like, what does that mean for you? I get like any tactics you can use. What’s the overall strategy? How should you be thinking about that? Um, but if you still have any questions, please put that in the chat and yeah, I’m gonna try to answer that.

Bye. Thank you so much for being here, everyone. Thank you for being such fantastic guests, guys, guests and Liam. Thank you so much. Like this has been, honestly, for me, it’s been, it’s been really helpful. I’m probably going to [00:43:00] write a lot about this once this is done.

[00:43:03] Liam Moroney: Oh, I appreciate that. This was fun. I love this.

I would do many more of these. Oh,

[00:43:07] Dozie Anyaegbunam: yeah. Um, I think as a, as a bonus today, um, Michael’s going to share a link. Um, like a free brand, it’s a brand gen and demand building report, um, that the storybook team and Liam put together. Please do check that out. I think it’s extremely, it’s extremely good read. Um, so yeah, that’s it for me and for you.

Thank you so much.