Hi, it's Ian.

Here are two things successful B2B brand teams are doing to add value to the business in a margin-focused 2024, and two things they are not.

Let’s start with what they’re not doing.

❌ Corporate purpose kumbayas

Putting budget against something as intangible as this feels tone deaf in the current business climate and further stigmatises the brand team as the folks that don’t understand the economic realities of the business. Avoid at all costs!

❌ Obsessing over the next brand campaign

Brand campaigns are important, but I see too many brand teams obsessing over them when there are more fundamental flaws in their brand that need to be fixed. More importantly, what happens in the very likely event that you don’t get budget? You don’t want to be the team that can only add value with a multi-million dollar ad budget.

Instead, this is what they’re prioritising for 2024.

✅ Solving for the ‘missing middle’ in the messaging stack

Most B2B businesses have two levels of messaging: product-level messaging and purpose level messaging. The former is used by product marketing to run demand-gen campaign and by sales teams to close deals. The latter, ostensibly plays an internal and investor role.

Here’s the problem.

Neither product focused messaging nor purpose level messaging is suitable for driving growth conversations with new prospects or with existing accounts. Single product focused messaging is too detailed and narrow and purpose level messaging adds no value at all.

The best B2B brand teams are creating ‘portfolio’ brand marketing roles, people who are responsible for creating multi-product, multi need messaging. This is the ‘missing middle’ and getting it right can unlock millions in marketing / brand influenced sales.

✅ Reducing portfolio bloat and creating a one firm mentality with a brand portfolio strategy

Many large multi-product B2B businesses are simply a collection of siloed products brought together in name alone. Different products have different teams which aren’t as interconnected as they should be, even if they share the same clients. The result is a disjointed experience for clients and a product portfolio that's impossible to navigate and discover.

A brand portfolio strategy can take an outside-in view of the portfolio, and group hundreds of products into fewer, more digestible families. Further, establishing the visual and verbal relationships between the families, creates greater cohesion across the business.
​
Both of the priority areas add meaningful and tangible value to the business and redefine the role of the brand team from logos and campaigns to playing a more strategic portfolio role across the business.
​
It’s a huge shift, but when it happens, brand teams go from trivial to business critical, overnight.
​
If you’d like to know how to do it for your team, just reply to this email.

Thanks for reading, Faisal Siddiqui​ Founder __ Z: Book a call​ W: creativebusinesscompany.com​