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Marketing Your Business Is Challenging
Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.
But those who struggle to market themselves can rejoice: you’re not alone. Everyone wrestles with this to some degree, including some of the biggest companies in the world who have teams of consultants devoted to the very practice. And boy oh boy, have some of these companies completely missed the mark.
The difference is, when you fail to market yourself, your résumé gets tossed to the bottom of the pile. When businesses fail to market themselves, they can potentially lose millions in sales.
Business to Business Priorities
Every corporation has to market themselves in some way, usually with corporate objectives and goals aimed at positioning their brand in a certain way. A marketing study conducted by McKinsey & Company surveyed the top 90 global B2B companies to identify recurring themes about how businesses are marketing their brands. The most commonly occurring themes were unsurprising:
- 86 percent posture themselves as role models for social responsibility
- 84 percent promote sustainability in products and services
- Two-thirds claimed to be drivers of innovation
Sounds familiar, right? There’s a reason why so many companies focus on these initiatives when creating their corporate messages. They sound great on paper, and are notoriously hard to measure. Sure, sustainability practices can be tracked, but how exactly do you measure your influence as a role model or innovator?
Lofty themes like these give a good impression, but don’t tend to resonate with consumers.
What Do the People Want?
The same survey also judged the impact each theme had on consumer perception of brand strength. You can spend all day waxing poetic about the virtues of your company, but do your customers even want to hear it?
In the case of our global B2B study, the answer is no.
In fact, the top three themes prioritized by global B2B brands (social responsibility, sustainability, and global outreach) were all judged statistically insignificant on their contribution to perceived brand strength.
Not statistically significant! Think about that for a second. The corporate mantras that businesses use to promote their image and draw in consumers have virtually no impact on how strongly customers view the brand. This speaks to a serious problem with the way these themes are utilized.
But consumers are notoriously fickle, right? If the themes provided by businesses don’t resonate with them, what themes do?
If we refer back to our study, we can see the most important themes that contribute to perceived brand strength:
- Honest and open dialogue
- Having a responsible supply chain
- High levels of specialist expertise
Honest and open dialogue was rated as the strongest contributor to perceived brand strength for consumers. This isn’t too surprising; after all, we all want to believe that we’re getting a fair deal from the companies we do business with. What is surprising is that fact that precisely zero companies in this survey stated an affiliation with this theme. It’s the story that consumers want to hear, so why do so few businesses bother to bring it up?
A Communication Disconnect
Businesses could be afraid that openly addressing their commitment to honesty and communication would send the wrong message (despite what you’ll hear at Honest Dave’s Used Car Lot.) And whether or not that mindset is realistic, the issue speaks to a greater disconnect between the characteristics that consumers value and the messages that businesses send.
We’re always painfully aware of the image we’re putting across to others, whether it’s promoting a corporate initiative, updating our résumé for the 10th time, or wondering if ordering wine at dinner will appear too pushy. Communication is the key to keeping the values of consumers and businesses aligned, and with much more than a second date on the line, businesses should make an effort to keep those goals in mind.
