Building Brand Awareness in 2025
Increasing brand awareness is a top goal for B2B companies in 2025. But what is a brand? And how can you evolve it to meet your changing company...
The presidential debate has spent a lot of airtime on something we businesspeople already know: corporations are people. Whatever the corporation's rights and responsibilities, success and failure comes down to the people that make up the business. And corporate strategy most often fails due to our inherent mental biases.
In a classic McKinsey report, Hidden Flaws in Strategy, Charles Roxburgh outlines the 8 human biases that drive good executives to create flawed strategies:
While McKinsey explores how each bias plays out in economics, we highlight three biases (Status Quo, Herding, and False Consensus) that falsely guide the marketing strategy process of many technology companies.
People maintain the status quo, not out of risk aversion, but of loss of expected return. In an experiment where subjects were asked how they would invest a hypothetical inheritance, 1/2 currently in a high-risk portfolio, 1/2 in a low-risk portfolio, both groups typically left the portfolio unchanged.
We see this play out every day: fear of changing the marketing mix, and resistance to abandoning past poor-performing marketing strategies and tactics. Even when metrics demonstrate a media channel or tradeshow does not deliver on expected marketing ROI, companies resist marketing budget allocation changes. Why? "If we've always done it, and this year we don't, people will wonder if we're out of business."
How to combat this bias?
Second only to "do what we've always done" is "do what the others in our industry are doing." Executives are afraid of a strategic misstep, but more so afraid to be the only one.
We continue to see resistance to social media in B2B technology companies because it's not currently done well and successfully. Marketing executives are afraid to invest in a strategic approach to social media-its execution is still relegated to small silos in the organization.
Inbound marketing is also suspect-if my website has a poor history of generating qualified leads, an optics company argues, Why would I invest it in as an engine for generating leads? After all I get so little traffic today!
How to combat?
We hear what we want to, from customers, stakeholders, and prospects, because of our tendencies to:
In marketing strategy, we often see product launch, branding and market positioning stall out or go off track due to false consensus. Executives struggle to put aside their own preconceptions about what customers want.
How to combat?
At PLS, we are often called in to perform a marketing assessment. The first step is qualitative research-talking to their customers. We hear things that surprise the technology companies we serve-not because they don't talk to their customers, but because they don't ask the right questions, or hear the real answers.
In your organization, which flaw do you see come into play?
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