B-to-B Marketers, Get out Your Flutes
Kathy Button Bell, CMO and vice president at Emerson, had some useful tips for B-to-B marketers when she spoke last week at a Business Marketing Association Chicago chapter luncheon.
Fair disclosure here, I’ve written about Kathy and marketing she’s done going back to the 1990s when she was in Chicago, so I’m a long-time fan. She joined St. Louis-based Emerson in 1999 and has been transforming the engineer-centric company into one that knows how to do B-to-B marketing. Part of what she discussed was a new Emerson campaign that started in 2009, “It’s Never Been Done Before…Consider it Solved”
As a B-to-B marketer, you “have to be a better pied piper than a marketing person,” she says, meaning you have to be able to lead senior management to the marketing world you want them to embrace.
When Button Bell arrived at Emerson, for example, its advertising centered on product and looked something like a hardware catalogue, she recalled. She has since gotten the company to focus on end customers in its marketers rather than products, an approach similar to what IBM is doing with its Smarter Planet campaign (for more on that, see the next issue of AMA’s Marketing Management which will feature an exclusive interview with IBM CMO Jon Iwata).
Other tips from Button Bell:
• Talking about solutions still works, the term has not been overused in B-to-B marketing.
• Marketing should serve as an intelligence source for sales, keeping sales staff up-to-date on what the competition is doing
And my favorite, if you need to film your CEO for a marketing piece, never say it will only take five minutes, you need time to get a B-to-B CEO relaxed in front of a camera.
Also in the interest of full disclosure, Kathy is running for the AMA board, you can read her bio in the February issue of Marketing News.
Comments
This is great, influencing senior management to see the company outside of being product centric with its B2B advertising campaign. The motto exudes confidence that Emerson will solve anything the customer may need doing whether it's ever been done before. The sales team should be adopting the same attitude with their consultative approach. I don't know if being a 'pied piper' is quite the analogy, sweet music that leads the 'rats' to drop off a cliff. That story does not end well. The pied piper wasn't paid for service rendered and returned to the town and lured away the children to a bad ending. Hope Kathy Button Bell got paid well for her leadership in transforming the business in a positive and prosperous direction! The Button Bell tips I agree. Perhaps making a video a 'fun' process and going digital will ease a CEO's tension, and that no film is being 'wasted'. It might even keep 'em on message. Best wishes to Kathy running for the board.
Posted by: Michael Kristiansen | March 10, 2010 2:00 AM