How to do B2b branding?

Designing B2B brands: A comprehensive guide

Designing a B2B brand involves a complex and multifaceted approach that goes beyond traditional branding methods used for consumer brands. The process requires a deep understanding of the business environment, a clear articulation of brand values, and strategic implementation across various touchpoints. This article explores the essential elements of designing effective B2B brands, drawing insights from the book "Designing B2B Brands: Lessons from Deloitte and 195,000 Brand Managers" by Carlos Martinez Onaindia and Brian Resnick.

Key Takeaway for Emerging B2B Brands

For new brands, especially in the B2B sector, the focus should remain on the essentials: clearly communicate what your product is, why it’s valuable, and ensure your brand name sticks in the minds of your target audience. While purpose-driven narratives might work for well-established giants, for smaller players, it could be an unnecessary distraction. Prioritizing clear, product-centric messaging over lofty ethical claims is often a more reliable strategy for growth.

The Problem with Purpose-Driven Marketing

In today’s saturated market, many brands feel compelled to go beyond their products and make sweeping moral claims. But this often leads to over-promising. While it’s common for brands to exaggerate product benefits (e.g., “the world’s favorite airline” or “the best lager in the world”), taking it further by tacking on exaggerated moral or ethical claims can seem insincere and undermine credibility. The fact that the big brand’s ability to fund purpose driven marketing initiatives stems from years of straightforward product-focused advertising that built its consumer base. This suggests that newer or smaller brands might be better off focusing on the fundamentals rather than jumping on the purpose bandwagon prematurely.

Understanding B2B Branding

In the B2B landscape, branding isn't about how entertaining or quirky your marketing campaigns are; it's about how much trust and confidence you inspire in your audience. This trust is crucial, especially in B2B settings where the stakes are high, and decisions are often long-term and strategic.

Interestingly, even the most valuable brands in the world can struggle to establish this trust in B2B scenarios due to issues related to reliability and longevity. Take Google, for example. Despite its dominant presence and efforts to penetrate the enterprise market, Google's brand is often met with skepticism. This stems largely from its track record of discontinuing products and services, leaving businesses wary of committing to its new offerings.

A recent example is the announcement of the discontinuation of Chromecast, which adds to the growing list of Google products that have been sunset. This history has become so notable that it’s a running joke in the tech community, reinforcing a reputation that makes businesses hesitate to adopt new Google products.

The SaaS industry, known for its rapid innovation, exemplifies this challenge. Innovation is celebrated, but it also introduces risks:

• Will this company still be around in five years?
• Will there be consistent updates and support for years to come?
• Are freelancers and agencies sufficiently familiar with this product?

In this context, brand reputation serves as the most powerful tool to mitigate risk. It’s more influential than social proof or an impressive investor portfolio. Building a strong, trustworthy brand takes time and consistent effort, but the importance of such a reputation becomes increasingly apparent as a company scales. Without it, even the most innovative products may struggle to gain traction in the B2B market.

What is Branding?

Branding in the B2B context is about building trust and consistency. It is not just a promise to stakeholders but a faith in the organization's ability to deliver on its commitments. This faith is built through consistent and quality interactions with the brand's products, services, and people. Deloitte's journey in branding started in 2003, focusing on creating a unified vision and becoming "the standard of excellence" in professional services.

Importance of Brand Identity

Brand identity is the tangible and intangible manifestation of the brand, expressed through visual, aural, and experiential elements. It is a strategic system of design and communication that helps distinguish the organization and build a desire for future interactions. For example, Deloitte's brand identity system includes a suite of flexible core elements that communicate intelligence and vibrancy across different touchpoints.

Key elements of B2b branding

1. Brand Strategy

A well-defined brand strategy aligns with the overall business strategy, determining the who, what, where, why, and how of the brand. It involves setting clear objectives, understanding the target audience, and addressing potential obstacles. Effective brand strategy leads to better brand equity, translating directly to brand value and the ability to command a premium for products and services.

2. Brand Architecture

Brand architecture organizes all functions and services within the brand portfolio, providing clarity and emphasizing core offerings. It ensures consistency and coherence across various business units and service lines. Deloitte's brand architecture avoids sub-brands to maintain the strength of the master brand, presenting a unified identity to stakeholders.

3. Brand Purpose

Brand purpose goes beyond serving clients or building revenue; it defines the organization's reason for being. It provides meaning to the work of employees and aligns with the broader societal impact. A credible, connected, and well-communicated purpose enhances brand engagement and loyalty.

4. Brand Positioning

Brand positioning differentiates the organization from its competitors by highlighting core attributes and creating a unique value proposition. It involves a collective comparative view that authentically represents the brand while setting it apart in the marketplace. Effective positioning requires a deep understanding of the organization's strengths and aspirations.

5. Brand Experience

The brand experience encompasses all interactions an individual has with the business, including digital and physical touchpoints. For B2B brands, the experience is extended and nuanced, requiring consistency and coherence across various channels. Deloitte's brand experience focuses on delivering a unified message through compositional and tonal consistency.

6. Brand Engagement

Brand engagement involves creating strategic interactions that energize employees and connect with external audiences. It is about building relationships through shared experiences and authentic representation of the brand's values. Engaged employees are the best promoters of the brand, living the brand's personality and promise.

7. Brand Measurement

Measuring the impact of branding efforts is crucial for continuous improvement. It involves identifying meaningful metrics related to awareness, attraction, and advocacy. Effective brand measurement provides insights into how the brand is perceived and helps align strategies for better brand performance.

Implementing B2b brand strategies

1. Consistency Across Touchpoints

Consistency is key to successful branding. Ensuring that all brand elements are aligned and consistently applied across various touchpoints helps in building a strong brand image. This includes visual identity, tone of voice, and brand messaging.

2. Leveraging Storytelling

Storytelling adds humanity and richness to the brand, making it memorable and distinct. Sharing personal and relevant stories enhances brand connectivity and engagement.

3. Enhancing Brand Experience

Focus on delivering a consistent brand experience across all channels and mediums. Integrate audience impressions and harmonize tactics for a robust and aligned brand experience.

4. Engaging Employees

Engage employees by involving them in brand-building activities and educating them about the brand's importance and function. Engaged employees act as brand ambassadors, promoting the brand through their daily interactions.

5. Measuring Success

Continuously measure the impact of branding efforts to gain insights and make informed decisions. Use the findings to enhance communication strategies and better understand audience needs.

B2b versus B2c branding

B2C, business-to-consumer brand purchases are often made on impulse, business-to-business buying decisions are driven by myriad factors and can span many months. So for B2Bs, think “best to build”: brand embedding requires significant investment, spread over numerous touch-points, over an expanse of time.

The 7 key questions for developing a B2b brand strategy

Developing a robust B2B brand strategy requires a thorough understanding of both the internal and external factors influencing your business. Here are the seven key questions you need to address:

 1. What is the current perception of the organization?

Understanding your current reputation is the first step in developing a brand strategy. This involves:

- Assessing Current Reputation: Gauge how your organization is currently viewed by stakeholders, including customers, employees, and industry peers.

- Audience Views: Determine what your target audience thinks about your products or services, and how they perceive your brand in terms of quality, reliability, and value.

- Existing Differentiators: Identify what sets your organization apart from competitors in the eyes of your audience. This could include unique features, superior customer service, or innovative solutions.

 2. What is the desired perception of the organization?

Next, you need to define how you want your organization to be perceived in the future. This involves:

- Future Associations: Determine the attributes and values you want your brand to be associated with.

- Points of Recognition: Identify key elements that will make your brand easily recognizable and memorable.

- Aspirations: Outline the long-term goals and aspirations for your brand, ensuring they align with your overall business strategy.

 3. What is the competitive landscape?

Analyzing the competitive landscape is crucial to positioning your brand effectively. This involves:

- Identifying Competitors: List existing brands in your industry that are well-established and may pose a challenge to your market entry or expansion.

- Barriers to Entry: Understand the obstacles that could hinder your brand’s growth, such as established customer loyalty towards competitors or regulatory challenges.

- Resource Comparison: Evaluate how your resources compare to those of your competitors, including financial, technological, and human resources.

 4. Is there sufficient cross-function/cross-service/cross-border consistency?

Consistency across all aspects of your organization is essential for a cohesive brand strategy. This involves:

- Alignment of Views: Ensure that all departments and functions within your organization have a common understanding of the brand’s mission, vision, and values.

- Cultural Consistency: Promote a unified culture that supports the brand identity across different services and geographical regions.

- Positioning Consistency: Maintain a consistent brand positioning in all markets and across all services to reinforce brand recognition and reliability.

 5. How mature is the legacy brand positioning?

Evaluating the maturity of your existing brand positioning helps determine the extent of changes needed. This involves:

- Current Position Assessment: Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your current brand positioning.

- Work Required: Identify the degree of effort needed to shift existing perceptions to align with your desired brand identity.

- Building on Positives: Leverage existing positive impressions and strengths to support the transition to the new brand positioning.

 6. Is there leadership support?

Leadership support is critical for the successful implementation of a brand strategy. This involves:

- Executive Understanding: Ensure that the leadership team comprehends the importance of brand strategy and its impact on business success.

- Ambassadorship: Gain commitment from executives to act as brand ambassadors, promoting the brand vision both internally and externally.

- Alignment with Business Goals: Align the brand strategy with the organization’s business goals, ensuring that resources and priorities are dedicated to supporting the brand.

 7. What resources are available?

Finally, assess the resources available to support your brand strategy. This involves:

- Financial Resources: Determine the budget available for branding activities, including marketing, advertising, and promotional efforts.

- Human Resources: Identify the team members and expertise required to develop and implement the brand strategy effectively.

- Growth and Pricing Strategies: Ensure that resources are allocated to support competitive pricing strategies and organizational growth, enabling the brand to achieve its desired market position.

Addressing these seven key questions will provide a comprehensive foundation for developing a successful B2B brand strategy. By understanding your current position, defining your desired perception, analyzing the competitive landscape, ensuring consistency, evaluating legacy positioning, securing leadership support, and assessing available resources, you can create a robust and effective brand strategy that drives long-term business success.

As a brand you can't get everyone to love you

As humans, we naturally seek attention and affection. We desire universal love and acceptance. However, it becomes apparent over time that garnering love from everyone is nearly impossible. This reality is mirrored in the world of branding.

Many brands fall into the trap of attempting to appeal to everyone. With each communication piece, they strive to reach and please a broad audience. Despite their efforts, they often fail, sometimes miserably.

Like individuals, brands need to prioritize their audience. They should seek love from those who resonate with them, focusing on those who align with their values and needs. Ignoring these core groups to chase universal approval is likely to result in alienation and lack of genuine connection.

For instance, if you are a luxury brand, direct your message towards those who can afford and aspire to be associated with you. Attempting to appeal to everyone dilutes your message, potentially alienating those who are either loyal or on the verge of becoming loyal.

In summary, brands should focus on building relationships with their target audience rather than seeking universal appeal. This approach not only strengthens brand loyalty but also ensures a more authentic and effective communication strategy.

By honing in on a specific audience, brands can create more meaningful and impactful connections, ultimately leading to sustained success. The narrower the target, the more distinctive the brand.

The recent research by Dentsu, as reported by Hannah Rashbass, highlights a significant shift in the priorities of B2B marketing, where brand building is becoming more critical than ever in securing contracts. The study, conducted over four years and encompassing 14,000 B2B buyer interviews, reveals that the traditional focus on lead generation is waning, while brand awareness and thought leadership are gaining importance.

Key Shifts in B2B Marketing Priorities:

1. Decline of Lead Generation: In 2021, B2B marketers ranked demand generation and lead conversion as the third most important strategic factor. By 2024, this priority dropped to seventh place, reflecting the reduced emphasis on pure performance marketing.
2. Rising Importance of Brand Awareness: Raising brand awareness and improving top-of-funnel performance now ranks as the most important strategic factor for B2B marketers, a significant leap from being sixth in 2021.
3. Gulf Between Marketers' and Buyers' Perceptions: A disconnect exists between how marketers view their brand identity and how buyers perceive it. While 71% of B2B marketers feel confident in their brand’s unique positioning, 68% of buyers believe that most B2B brands sound and act the same. This gap has widened since 2021, indicating a growing dissatisfaction among buyers.
4. Thought Leadership’s Rising Role: The need for B2B brands to establish themselves as thought leaders has surged. Ranked 20th in importance last year, it now stands at third. However, only 26% of brands are rated highly for their thought leadership, presenting a significant opportunity for those that can excel in this area.
5. Brand Reputation as an Employer: Buyers are increasingly looking at a company’s reputation as an employer when making decisions. This factor, a proxy for trust, has risen to become the second most important consideration in 2024, up from 10th in 2023.
6. Trust and Safety in Decision-Making: Feeling secure when signing contracts remains the top priority for buyers. The research suggests that brands can accelerate decision-making by excelling at hybrid brand experiences—those that blend strong digital and human interactions while quickly establishing credentials. Strong brand experiences can reportedly shorten the decision-making process by as much as 16 weeks.

The Flippening: Brand Over Performance

The report references the concept of “the Flippening,” introduced by Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of Evidenza, which describes the pivotal moment when B2B businesses recognize the greater financial value of brand marketing over performance marketing. This shift is leading CMOs to allocate a larger portion of their budget—over 51%—to brand-building activities rather than demand generation.

Personalization and Buyer Experience

For the first time, personal decision drivers are outweighing professional ones in importance. Buyers are increasingly valuing brands that take the time to understand their day-to-day challenges and tailor their solutions accordingly. The research shows a rise in the percentage of buyers who expect B2B suppliers to focus more on understanding their needs—from 67% in 2022 to 71% in 2024. Yet, only 39% of buyers in 2024 report being highly satisfied with how well brands are tailoring their offerings, a decline from 43% in 2022.

The findings underscore the growing significance of brand in B2B marketing, where the differentiation of brands, thought leadership, and a human-centered approach are becoming critical factors in winning contracts. Companies that successfully build strong brand identities, offer tailored experiences, and present themselves as trustworthy employers will be better positioned to meet the evolving expectations of B2B buyers.

The Misalignment Between Perception and Reality in B2B Branding

One of the most significant challenges facing B2B marketers today is the gap between how we perceive our brand efforts and how buyers actually experience them. According to a comprehensive study by dentsu, 71% of B2B marketers believe they are doing a strong job in communicating a distinct brand position or unique selling proposition (USP). However, when asked, more than two-thirds (68%) of buyers expressed that many brands in their industry "all sound and act the same," highlighting a major disconnect.

This misalignment is alarming, as it suggests that despite our efforts to differentiate and stand out, we’re failing to cut through the noise. Buyers perceive us as indistinguishable from our competitors, which diminishes the effectiveness of our marketing and communications. As B2B marketers, this should prompt serious reflection: if we believe we’re doing well but our customers don’t agree, then something fundamental is amiss.

Why Brand Feels Fuzzy in B2B

In the B2B space, brand often feels intangible and difficult to quantify. Many in our industry tend to reduce everything to data, metrics, and ROI, sidelining brand as something secondary or "soft." Yet, brand plays a central role in decision-making, particularly when those decisions involve significant financial commitments, long-term contracts, and complex buying cycles.

The reality is that brand isn't just about logos, color schemes, or taglines. It's the collective emotional and psychological relationship that buyers form with a company over time. It's how a company makes buyers feel about its products, services, and promises. The failure to appreciate this intangible value leads many companies to fall into the trap of assuming that strong performance in lead generation or direct response marketing means strong brand performance as well.

However, as the dentsu study illustrates, buyers aren’t receiving the differentiated, value-driven messages we believe we’re putting out. We’ve focused too much on short-term metrics like conversion rates and not enough on the long-term investment that brand requires.

The Emotional Side of B2B: Safety and Trust

One of the most revealing findings from the dentsu study is that the number one consideration for buyers when making B2B purchasing decisions is the feeling of safety when signing a contract. This has been the top consideration for four consecutive years, underscoring the emotional weight of decision-making in B2B contexts.

While we often think of B2B buying as a highly rational process driven by data and facts, emotions play a powerful role. Buyers need to feel confident and secure in their decisions, especially when they are choosing long-term business partners or solutions with significant financial implications. The desire to "feel safe" speaks to a deep, emotional need that brands must address.

Brand as the De-Risking Agent

If safety is the primary concern for B2B buyers, then brand becomes the de-risking agent that helps mitigate this concern. Brand is what turns the intangible qualities of trust, credibility, and reliability into something tangible for buyers. It gives form to the social proof, case studies, customer testimonials, and thought leadership that we use to build trust.

Brand builds confidence, and confidence reduces risk. Buyers want to choose a company they can rely on, not just one that offers a good deal or has an appealing product. Strong branding is what helps convince buyers that they’re making the right decision, even when other factors—such as pricing or product features—are similar across competitors.

The dentsu study shows that we’re not doing as well as we think in communicating our message and value, despite our focus on various forms of demand generation. This suggests that while we’re generating leads and interest, we’re failing to establish the deeper brand connection that makes buyers feel secure in their decision to work with us.

The Year of Brand: Reclaiming the Importance of B2B Branding in 2025

2025 needs to be the year that B2B marketers reclaim the importance of brand. While demand generation and performance marketing will always have their place, we must return to the fundamentals of branding—building trust, credibility, and emotional connections with our audience. This is not a call to abandon metrics or data-driven marketing but a recognition that brand is an essential layer of our marketing strategy that we have neglected for too long.

Investing in brand means creating a distinctive voice, narrative, and value proposition that resonates on a deeper level with buyers. It means stepping out of the "sameness" that buyers are currently experiencing and offering a brand experience that truly sets us apart. Most importantly, it means reinforcing the sense of safety and trust that buyers seek when making critical business decisions.

As we move into 2025, the challenge for B2B marketers is to not only continue optimizing for conversions but to build brands that make our buyers feel confident, safe, and inspired to choose us over the competition. By addressing this brand gap, we can transform the way buyers perceive us, strengthen our market position, and ensure long-term success.

Conclusion

Designing a B2B brand requires a strategic approach that integrates business objectives with brand identity and purpose. By focusing on consistency, engagement, and measurement, businesses can build strong and impactful B2B brands that resonate with stakeholders and drive long-term success. The lessons from Deloitte's branding journey provide valuable insights into the complexities and rewards of B2B branding, offering a replicable model for other organizations aiming to strengthen their brand presence in the marketplace. Investing in a strong B2B brand is crucial for any business aiming to sustain growth, build reputation, and achieve long-term success.