B2B Marketer
Issue No. 47 - June/ july
Joy of making your own rules
by Kimon Lycos
Traditional B2B marketing seems to be all about how to beat the competition with confrontation and militarystyle tactics and lingo. Beating them with technology, price, logistics, brand and cute BDMs as troops on the ground. Nothing short of an all-out escalation ensues, with competitors in a market space trying to outdo each other; classic hallmarks of a war of attrition. Products get bigger (or smaller), faster, more powerful, more refined, while the company looks to cut costs, to boost profits and seek more ways of outdoing, outwitting and out & out defeating the competition. When they get really serious they hire fashion models to sell their musclebound offerings to gasping engineers, who don’t get a whole lot of sun, and enjoy hanging with pretty people who actually pay them attention.
Is this the path you go down every time you wonder about getting an edge over the competition? Your mind turns to making better product, doing it cheaper, and when all else fails, hope that a suntanned cleavage will distract customers long enough to sign them up on an extensive leasing contract?
The real issues with traditional B2B marketing paths are the limitations they impose on your thinking and tactics, because you find yourself looking at the competition, not the finish line. The arms race leads to a point where innovation becomes expensive, pricing can only be rationalized so much and markets fill to capacity sooner or later.
Let’s think about the “joy of playing with yourself” - and shame on you for any dirty thoughts. Going head-to-head with the competition ignores market differentiation, a big reason why people switch suppliers, and leads to a wilderness of “commodity-sameness”.
My son has taken to tennis recently, and for a 10-year-old he is unnervingly savvy. He takes great joy in hitting the damn ball where I’m not. The little smartypants made my presence irrelevant and enjoyed making the old man work.
A company which ca...
