B2B Branding Needs Operations To Survive

Companies often embark on marketing and branding overhauls thinking of them as surface improvements. Like buying a new suit for a job interview, the thinking goes, a fresh brand can immediately make you look better in the eyes of your customers.

This may be true, but let's take the analogy a bit further. Consider what happens after you wow the interviewer and get the job: when you show up for work, you'd better be able to live up to your new suit's promise of competence.

Beyond Whitewash

Good marketing and branding is not a whitewash job. It challenges a company to grow, to move forward and compete on a higher level, and is fundamentally an expression of a company's new promise to its customers. In the end, the success of any marketing strategy therefore rests on a company's ability to fulfill that promise.

Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. Recognizing the need to step up their marketing efforts, B2B companies hire an agency like Synaxis to give them a brand overhaul. That's the easy part. Yet all too often, they take our advice on marketing and branding, but ignore everything we have to offer about what improvements, on the operations side, will be necessary to pull it off.

Eventually, it dawns on the company that all the things they said and promised will have to be done. They realize they don't have the staff, processes, sales force, delivery team, etc. to do the job. (And that's if they are lucky. Most don't ever realize their shortcomings.) Suddenly, it becomes clear: they must modernize their operations. This can be a difficult, painful process—so difficult, in fact, that many companies choose to ignore these realities and continue doing things as they've always been done.

Lead Nurturing

A good example of this predicament is lead nurturing. Eighty percent of people who contact your company aren't ready to buy your product or service. They're in the research phase. Most often, companies allow these leads to fade away. A great strategy for increasing sales is to figure out ways to keep these leads interested over time, so that they return to you when they're ready. But this sort of marketing requires more than a new logo; the company must develop a new focus on content-production, with the right technology, infrastructure, and people.

Maximize Branding Efforts

Without operational improvements companies can never take full advantage of their new marketing and branding. And when they don't see sales increasing, they assume they've wasted their money. In a way, they're right. At best, they might see some minor improvements in sales, but nothing like what they'd hoped to achieve.

Marketing and branding simply works to engage your market. You still need to do the work of honestly assessing how things have been run in your company and whether they can be done better. Good marketing and branding goes hand in hand with good business.