Welcome to the Growth on Fire podcast! Katy Howell, is joined by Tejal Patel previously from Cisco, Microsoft and Nokia; and Scott Stockwell previously from IBM and PwC, two industry experts who will share their takeaways from the big B2B event of the year: B2B Ignite. If you’re a B2B marketer looking to stay ahead in a crowded and competitive market, this episode is for you.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Well, hello. And we’re back with another live. And this time it’s Growth on Fire that we’re talking about, following the absolutely amazing B2B Ignite. So, we’re going to be diving very deeply into the unexpected, quirky and downright interesting insights that we got from the event and I’m being joined by two very, very heavyweight industry professionals who know their stuff, who are going to analyse a little bit of what we heard to be able to give their perspective as real-life marketeers on what are the things we need to focus on.

So, I’d like to welcome, Tejal and Scott. Let me. Hello.

Hello.

Hi.

I’ve got a wee summary – Tejal you’re a seasoned marketing leader, and demand gen expert, passionate about fostering culture. And I know that from all the conversations we’ve had of kind of creativity, collaboration, drawing on a wealth of experience, having worked at Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, I mean, your credentials are like, awesome. And Scott, creative communicator and agile marketing advocate, you were IBM recently, wasn’t it?

It was, yeah, a couple of weeks ago. Yep.

And now you’ve set up your own consultancy called Work Matik, which is with a “K”, if anybody wants to know, and you’re also a strategy and innovation expert at B2B marketing Propolis, which is really brilliant, brilliant community.

It is fantastic. Been there since the start. It’s, you know, a big part of B2B Ignite and it’s, you know, an extension of the lovely B2B marketing family that we’re all part of.

Exactly, exactly. So, before we get started, let me give you a little bit of context, because we want to dive into some of the nitty gritty. So, I want to set the stage a little bit, because we know B2B is a beast of its own and lead gen, particularly in we’ve all had a bit of a rough first half of the year. And the buyer journey has become this weird labyrinth now, with 75% bulk market is now focused on demand gen rather than lead gen because we’re trying to move up the funnel and the pandemic seems to accelerate in digital adoption but that means that we’re all we’ve all got our hands in trying to do everything all at the same time. And I think that there’s some real fundamentals, like the increasing cost of customer acquisition. So, part of the reason I put this live together was the question isn’t how do we do B2B marketing? Because I think we know that by now, in the current climate do we do it effectively, creatively, and how can we measure in a market that really is more saturated and a more sceptical than ever? So that’s what we’re getting into today. So, my first question to both of you is, so chat to me some of your key takeaways from the conference and any surprising insights or themes that stood out for you. I don’t know if you want to start, Tejal?

Yeah, sure. I think we’re going to talk a bit more about some of the takeaways coming out as we go through today but first of all, I think for me, I was really impressed with the quality of the content, how much more sophisticated, B2B marketing has become more established, more grown up, I would say. You know, I’m only eight years in B2B, but 20 years before that in B2C and when I came into B2B, it felt very much like the cousin of B2C not really pushing like it should. I think the sense I got out of that one-day event was really, really impressive. Couple of big things that came out for me and by the way, I think for people who did attend, the recordings have been shared as well. So, I know there were so many sessions, so many running at the same time and I’ve been watching a couple of them. One of them was a breakfast briefing with a lady called Michelle Goodall, who is an expert on the community side. And that’s a subject really close to my heart as well. And she spent a bit of time talking about community led growth. How to start, why that’s important. How do you show the ROI of it in the long term? The impact it has for your brand and your reputation. So, love that, love that. And the other one might seem obvious. really love Steve Chemistry’s presentations, on that concept, but I haven’t really thought of exactly by group marketing BGM is what you call that. And I know you said another acronym, but one of the things that came out from that was, different types of content out there. He was asking the room, what’s most valuable, you know, is it inspirational? Is it, you know, entertaining content, informative content. And the most valuable that will be the most impactful with your audiences as well is educational content. I think there’s a lot to unpick with that as well, but educational content is the most important thing. Not just your offer and like you said, your demand gen stuff. I think those are my two big takeaways.

I love it. Scott. What were yours?

So, picking up on the same thing, that sort of is it educational? Is it useful? I can’t remember who’s session it was. I think it was one of the fireside chats, but one of the people said, you know, the marketing isn’t what the salesperson wants to talk about the product. It’s not what the product team think the customer wants to know. It’s really understanding what does the customer want to know? How close are you to the customer? You know, how frequently do you talk to them? That’s why I think the community side is also really interesting. So, I went to the breakfast briefing as well and that whole wisdom of the crowd and what do your peers know and what are your peers sharing? And what did they understand is sort of the, it’s as close as you can get to the customer without it being your direct customer, but the ability to learn from everybody else. I think that is in abundance at Ignite. I’ve been for sort of several years back from when it was in the design centre and then when it’s kind of moved to different locations. And this thing I think I always come away with is B2B marketing might have been sort of the corelation, but it’s sort of coming of age. I mean, the fact that sort of Cannes fairly recently added it as one of their categories and it’s like it is we are family, you know, it’s a good bunch of people that have got a really challenging audience to get to and some pretty generally expensive products that they want to move. And it’s like, right, come on everyone, here we are. Let’s go.

That’s so true. It does have an amazing community feel, and it’s music to my ears because I know both Steve and Michelle very well. I’ve known them for, well over a decade or two. In fact, I used to train at the IDM with Steve. We were both trainers there back in the day when social was all new. So it’s music to my ears to hear that. And I think I’m with you. For me, there was, while it feels very detailed, very obvious, we need to know our customer more but there was so much detail in that, wasn’t there? There was so much intensity. So, I want to crack on with some of the sessions that we managed to sort of, all of us attend in one fashion or another. So, it’s kicking off with, a question for Tejal. Rachel Fairlie and Sarah Robb suggested we should burn our brand guidelines. It’s a quite provocative statement. What did you think? What did you think of this idea? Should we just chuck our brand guidelines in the bin?

Yeah, I think that kind of, bit of a nod back to feminism and whenever it was the 60s or something. I won’t talk about that, but burning brand guideline sounds like burning set underwear. I think it was a bit much, if I’m honest. You know, I mean, I agree in principle that there needs to be a level of flexibility with brand guidelines, but prime guidelines are guidelines. They’re not a rule book. I think it’s going a bit far, in my opinion, to just throw them out. You need something and structure to enable your brand to stand out. You know? And I think for me, there’s two things about your brand. It’s what are people saying about your brand when you’re not in the room. And that also includes our personal brand as well, by the way, but especially in B2B, I think that’s one. And the second one is, is it recognisable? This is one of the visual and the content side, is it recognisable if your logo isn’t there. Those things are super important, and unless you’ve got all of your things around your tone of voice and those things right, I think you can’t throw the guidelines up the room. And I think B2B needs that. I mean, honestly, if you take that logo away, I would argue most B2B brands look the same, feel the same. Everyone’s uses blue. I mean, what is it about blue that brands love about this? Oh, come on guys, there’s an entire colour palette for us to use. But I think what I love what they said, which was consistency is key. I think they came out with that too. I think that’s the important bit is do you show up time and again in the same way? Whereas in B2B we seem to get a little bit bored, and I think that brands like Coke and McDonald’s is they haven’t really changed that for 50 years, 40 years, however long they’ve been around for. Right? I mean, Coke’s been around for 100 years and they still, if you picked up a Coke at from a 100 years ago, you’d know it’s Coke. I mean, how many iterations are B2B brands going through? Right? And having just come from Cisco, Cisco had so many acquisitions, each of them with their own brand and their own tone. And we often had that problem, frankly, that you’d see a LinkedIn feed and you’ve got 2 or 3 different Cisco companies showing up differently. And that’s also not acceptable. So, I think there is a challenge for certain companies to show up in a cohesive way but be stand out from their competitors. And so, for that reason, I think you kind of need guidelines on kind of getting a little bit against what Rachel and Sarah said.

To be fair, they did say, don’t chuck them, don’t really chuck them away. But it’d be really interesting, Scott, to get your perspective, you’ve got extensive experience, particularly in creative comms and brand strategy. So are you seeing a shift our people are interested in letting go off that?

I have been the brand thought police in IBM. So, the ones that really go out and make sure you know have you done it right. Is it the right phone. Is it the right position. Is it the right logo. Has it been applied correctly. And Tejal to your point, the real reason you do that is consistency. So that particularly if you’re in an organisation that has had a number of acquisitions, you’ve acquired an organisation to be part of kind of your big brand family, and you want to retain the uniqueness of what you’ve acquired, but make sure that your customers understand it’s still part of your overall brand proposition. So, I think the brand book as it stands has a lot of third factor, but nobody is going to go through and thumb through it and make sure they’re doing it right. I think, on the stage, they make a really good point about having it more as an ingredient store cupboard so people could go and get the components for the branding that they needed and sort of use that to then create their communications going to market. And I think that’s part of what you need. I think the other part that you do need is think you still need somebody there if you’re not sure how to apply it. So, say you’ve got the ingredients in the store cupboard, but you’ve never cooked something before. You could make a hot mess by just combining things randomly. So, either you have some tooling that makes it easy to do, and then it might be restrictive, or you have someone you could ask to say, no, I haven’t just done it right or, you know, is this is this doing what it needs to do. So, store cupboard for ingredients, either a tool or somebody that you can just double check with if you need to but consistency you’ve got to have. Second thing I would say, and this is why I think lots of things are the colour blue. Blue, I think is the colour of trust. And particularly for B2B brands, there is a desire to be a trusted partner in much of what we do, which is why I think blue gets chosen quite a bit. But again, back to that point on, sort of, do you give everyone the ingredients in the store cupboard, or do you make everyone follow the brand book? It’s down to trust. Is everyone in your organisation going to do the right thing, use it the right way because it’s that consistency, it’s a little bit like Pavlov’s dogs. You say the same thing. People get used to it. They know what it stands for. The golden arches, the Coke bottle. We’ve all been trained to know what those are and you do need to keep some things consistent.

Yeah, I could not agree with you more. There is a downside to that, which is those that are sort of military precision. Branding in social media comes off as clunky and ugly most of the time. And this is that whole point about it being ingredients of coaching your fellow content creators and marketeers into understanding how to use and stretch the brand a little bit more, rather than just chucking a logo on or sitting at the beginning of a game. All of these things. It’s really interesting because I thought the most important thing here was collaboration, communication internally rather than the issue over brand. I feel the most important point that they brought up was that we need to talk to each other about why things are a particular way, so that for me was fascinating.

Can I jump in on that as well? If you don’t mind. I think the other thing that, and I do agree with the sentiment of where they’re going, which is that flexibility you need and agility, I think, you know, we need to talk about agility. I’ll give you an example. We’ve had this huge IT outage, right, that everyone in the world has heard about. Unfortunate for CrowdStrike that this is being, you know, a lot of backlash there and a lot of having to kind of get more proactive about their communication. But it’s an industrywide thing. Now, there is an opportunity, a situation like that. If that happened in the B2C brand, something blew up. There’d be guerilla marketing or there’d be ways. You don’t necessarily have to call out your competitor. But all the security brands out there in cyber security, whatever you are in that tech space, cloud, brands, there’s something you could have done that’s not necessarily like anti CrowdStrike, but hey, you can trust us. We can do something. We can. There’s so much creativity in social media. These are the moments you can jump on to. Was there a B2B brand that did anything. No. But I don’t know if anyone saw it. And this was in the UK Decathlon, the kind of sportswear brand. You might see this on LinkedIn or something. Just, just kind of search for it. You come across it. They took out the updated one of the digital out-of-home boards. I don’t know the location of it, but they used that blue screen of death that you see. And that has been publicised a lot. And they put a messaging out there saying, you know, can’t kind of access your computer. Got a problem with it? Why don’t you come to Decathlon, get some sports gear, get outside, be outdoors. We’ve got 50% off everything or something they did. That was jumping on the moment that you couldn’t have planned for. And the only way you can do that back to the brand guidelines is you need a level of flexibility and agility in your organisation that you’re prepared and ready in your processes to jump on something like this.

I think you probably you need a little bit of budget also tucked in your back pocket. So, you don’t need to go and spend a long time going through the money, the stakeholder reviews. It’s like the Oreo you know, dunking in the dark. It’s like if you can be ready, as you say, at that moment when everyone’s attention is on something, and you just borrow a little bit of that space for your message. Genius.

Yes. With a bit of care, of course, because you don’t want to jump on.

You don’t want to be ambulance chasing.

No. Tejal, what was the most, sort of surprising insight or thought that came up at the event for you?

I think, I mean, I’ve mentioned a couple, like, Michelle Goodwill session was amazing. I loved what Steve can be shot to say, but one of the other ones I attended was, and I don’t know who was presenting, but it was a case study for GE Red Nova. And I think that’s kind of the not say the power. It was like wind energy and that part of GE. But they did like a sprint a five-day sprint on ABM planning. And I think they used a lean methodology. And they got all of the key stakeholders in the same room over five days, lots of pre-work that had to be done obviously for to prepare for those five days together. But they had like technical people in there, product, people, finance, marketing, sales. You left your job title at the door and the only person who was to have the job title was the leader or the kind of scrum master type person. And what they did in those five days, and I loved what they’re doing that session, it was they prioritised their accounts on the needs assessment. They spent a day on messaging. They prioritised those accounts, like I said then they spent a day on content planning. And then the last day was put in like, I think they called it a sales pack of getting the entire plan together, who does what and the fact that they were able to do what would have taken months. I mean, I think back at my time at Cisco, something like that probably would have been months and months if not stretching to a years of trying to get different organisations work. They did that in five days. I thought that process was really inspirational, and I would love the opportunity to do something like that, where you bring key people together in a room, nothing else, no emails, nothing. This is what you’re going to prioritise if it’s that important to you – ABM and getting to the crux of the right customers and planning against them, that’s the best investment of time, right? Five days and then you’re ready to go. So that was a great session. I thought.

That’s really interesting because Scott, you do design thinking, which is a similar kind of thing.

Yeah, the sort of the lock in approach. So, IBM’s been a partner with the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Association for a long time. So, the Wimbledon Championships, you know, you’re probably quite familiar with that one, the way that that runs, and we’ve been doing it for I think 7 or 8 years now, was literally everybody in a room which we called the bunker, all focus just on the digital marketing for Wimbledon. So, we’ve done a lot of work up front. So, it wasn’t just, you know, the two weeks of the championships in one room. But not only was it cross-functional marketing and comms within IBM, it was also agency partners. So, we had the ad agency, we had the PR agency, and then we had connections through courtside. So, it you know, it was like a crucible of everybody that could do anything related to that campaign all in one space, all at the same time, which means the speed of the communications and the decision making is near immediate. And that’s really what makes a difference in terms of kind of turning those campaigns around really fast. I went to Georgie Gilmore’s session. She was doing channel partner marketing, which is almost the corelation of the poor relation in the world. You know, it’s normally not got the most funding, not got the biggest team is always the: oh, hang on, don’t forget the channel partners. It’s like, you know, it’s not the front of the bus. And she was making the really good point that the size of the opportunity for B2B organisations to go to market with channel partners is massive. And if you look at the size of the opportunity and then you look at the size of the investment in both channel partner teams and the budget they generally get, they are poles apart. And I think as business models change, I think most B2B organisations are probably using channel partners more. And are we investing more in that, basically that very important channel. She made the point, you know, really brilliantly and everyone sort of went like, that’s so much money, we are so missing a trick. So, for me, that was that was a big standout.

And quite a practical kind of pragmatic.

Easy to say. You know, you look at it and you know if you just divide your marketing budget up based on where are you actually going to make your sale, most organisations so think if they did that very simple maths and then compared that to the percentage of budget channel partners are getting – big gap and with big gap, big opportunity.

I’m with you. I’m with you. Do ask questions, guys. If there’s anything that you want to know that happened at B2B Ignite. But I do want to talk to Tejal about the fact you were on stage, my lovely. And, talking about some really, super interesting insight. The one that I think struck me was that personal decision drivers now surpass professional ones. I was like, wow, wow. I always knew there was a bit of an emotional bit in in the purchase decision, even in B2B, but this is, you know, this is a whole new level. So, talk to us about how you think that shift should influence our strategies. What was that? And the other data that was taught to bear in while you were on stage.

Yeah, that was interesting, isn’t it? That tipping point that we’ve now reached so that, that data is coming from Dennis’s B2B superpowers index that they run annually. They run it globally. I think a few thousand people that they survey with it and it is that tipping point where personal decision drivers have outweighed professional ones when it comes to, B2B decision making. And I think, like you said, coupled with trust and Scott’s has told us about why blue is. Yes, I did know that by the way, so that’s new information I’ve learned today. But the trust aspect is so important in in B2B buying, thought leadership, company culture, which you also just mentioned there, Kate and company culture by the way, I think that was one of the factors in deciding whether to sign a contract. The second biggest one is how does that company you’re about to sign with, how does it treat its employees? Which I couldn’t believe that that is such a so high up there. So, I think what it’s showing is that there’s emotional aspects to B2B buying that I think we tend to ignore. Right? We don’t, we focus on the rational aspects. We focus on offers and lead gen and demand gen and of course those things are important. But I think if you unless you’re emotionally engaging with those audiences, you’re not really building a relationship for the long term. So, for me, I think the common-sense stuff here is when you’re building a strategy, I think about it is a pyramid structure, your foundation, your bottom part is the brand. How do you show up? What are people saying about your brand when you’re not in the room? What if your logo is not on? Is it recognisable? What’s your tone like? But it’s also things like the consistency bit, of course, that we talked about earlier. But, it’s also the thought leadership aspects in that as well, by the way, was another critical fact, that was the third most important factor in signing a contract is, is that company a thought leader in the space that I’m looking to buy from them?

How are you sharing all of that? How are you investing and how is your communication strategy talking about the thought leadership. So, I think those things you have to have back to that pyramid that I’m talking about, it’s your building blocks. Only then can you stop doing the transactional stuff and the, the offer let stuff. If you don’t have that bottom part, the transactional stuff is very, very short term. And I want to also mention, I think some of us will have heard about LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, and they did a study a while ago, which, you know, they repeat a lot. I’m trying to repeat a lot as well, which is of your entire buying group, your market, your audience, your customer base – only 5% are actually going to be in the market to buy today. And I think they’ve done extensive research to show it is about 5%, the 95%. are not buying right now. So, this whole idea of this is my campaign right now and we’re focusing on this product. Well, okay, that’s your campaign and you are doing pipeline generating activity, but you’re only going to talk to a subset. What are you going to talk to the rest of your 95% about, because they’re not in the market to buy today. Yet, you need to equally engage with them in order that by the time they get into that 5% and they’re ready. Katy, you mentioned earlier, buying cycles and journeys are longer, I think two months longer something.

Yeah.

I don’t know what the average one looks like now, but let’s say there are six nine months at least, right, in B2B. You’ve got to be engaging them otherwise you’re not even going to be in the considering set. By the way, that’s another term I don’t see being used enough in B2B and B2C. We talked about it all the time. Are you in the consideration set? Are you on the shopping list? Marketers need to be thinking about those things, right? It’s no good just being focused on, you know, generate pipeline and you’re talking to a tiny number.

Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a wild focus on bottom of funnel, and I get it, I get it. But it’s the trouble is that the pool of bottom of funnel is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And buyers are buying for a multitude of reasons, usually in quite large decision-making units that are no longer just one person, but maybe upwards of ten people. And exactly what you said, which is if you’re not memorable, they don’t remember you and they say there was a piece of research, I’ll need to dig it out. I’ll put it in comments, and I’ll find it again, that said, you know, if you’re not on the list at the outset, you know you just never get picked. It’ll always be the person they buy from it’s on the list at the outset, which tells you that the sale is happening way before the sale happens. And I think that for me is, that we have to follow the data and stop pretending that it isn’t happening. That brings a whole new set of challenges, which is also convincing our colleagues, our senior leadership, etc., that that focusing on the next quarter is not the way forward. So, but I’ve got we’ve got a lovely question from Elena, talking about company culture, how are current trends in remote working and digital transformation influencing company culture in the B2B space? I don’t know if either of you.

So, I’ll yeah, I’ll have a start at that one. Coming from an organisation that’s been very technical and very virtual, the culture is very well kind of groomed around the world. So geographically, there’s a real sense of one big family. You know, you are an IBMer. That’s how employees are kind of referred to. And everybody understands what that means, how to treat each other and that is the same whether or not you’re in a physical room with somebody or you’re on a conference call with them, or you’re on a web meeting with them, or it’s a mixture of all of those things. But that’s probably been something that I’ve experienced ever since I joined IBM. So, this is going back, you know, tens of years. So, it’s always been like that. So, this is just how we behave around here, you know, this is the respect we have for each other, respect we have for our customers. You know, we are innovative people. So, if you can think of a new idea, a new way of doing it, that’s really encouraged. And the sort of the lines between is it virtual, is it physical – almost aren’t there. It’s just that’s how everyone works. But I think when we came into the pandemic and lots of people went: oh, we, you know, we’re not going to see each other, we’ve got to do this through little windows and, you know, we’re not going to see each other. What does that mean gave everyone a real challenge of what is your brand? What are your values? How do you behave? And now you need to do that through a little window. Is that different? Do you need to do anything differently? So, it’s, again, it goes back a little bit to the brand book. You know, the brand book might be the facial expression but the brand values are this is the way we get things done. This is how we work together. And that stuff is like, you know, it’s like Brighton rock. It’s the word that goes all the way through the middle. So cut it at any point. Physical space, virtual space, bit of a mixture. As long as that bit’s the same, you’re going to be okay. But if you don’t know what that bit in the middle is, you’re going to have a challenge.

Yeah, I agree, I agree with what Scott’s completely saying now. I think certain companies have already set up to operate in this hybrid world. Cisco was another one. It was really not at all difficult for most employees to shift that. But I think the companies who left five days a week fixed in a location was a culture shock. And then now you see the same companies trying to get people back into five days a week, which is probably a topic for another time. But I think, I think there’s also here absolutely, the lazy way to drive your culture is everybody’s in the same office together at the same time. The harder work is how do you transfer it? As Scott said, when you’ve got a little window to look at, I think that’s also about leadership. It’s the role of leadership. It can’t just be your HR Department or your guidelines that says, this is how we’re going to behave, and this is how we’re going to respect each other and the things we read. I think it’s only going to be executed and lived through the leadership that you have and how do they kind of step up to this new world that we work in?

Yeah, it has to attract the top and go and go all the way down. I’ve also seen the flip side. So, this is pre-pandemic, IBM used a piece of software called Invision, which was a sort of a front end that didn’t need a back end and it’s an entirely virtual company or it was at the time and they had their first in-person event. So, for them, it was unusual for everybody to be together, but they really managed to get the spirit of the organisation, which was very young, very fresh, very, you know, sort of find your way, but do it in a very supportive way, and you translate that into a physically then and they managed to do exactly the same thing. So, they had a really nice little touch point where they had a sort of set of little badges where it was like cat, dog, gin, whiskey, tea, coffee. And you could just sort of like choose a few things that were like you and stick them on your badge when you went in, which was a perfect icebreaker. So, when you were walking around, you kind of see someone with like, oh, you’re another dog person or, oh, you know, it’s gin for you. And he was like, this company is great at bringing people together. They’d only done it virtually, but they totally got how to do it physically.

Yes. Yeah. And I think there’s also a lesson to be learned from marketing. So, some of the challenges and we’ll talk a little bit about what we heard on the show floor. But some of the challenges I heard, which is trying to get things done, trying to get people to follow along, is about is incumbent on us as marketing leaders to overcommunicate what we’re doing, not just so that everybody understands the direction we’re going in, but with the increasing desire to do employee advocacy, as marketeers. If we’re not pushing and explaining why we’re doing certain things, not only does it sort of stymie us from having a relationship with sales, but more importantly, the more we educate upwards to our leadership team, the more likely we are to be able to deploy what we need to deploy to get us there, rather than just sort of hunkering down and getting tossed.

There’s one thing I don’t think, well, I’ll put it the other way around. There’s one thing I think we could do more, which is once we’ve transmitted a message check, what was the reception? We’re very good at doing the this is the strategy, this is the direction, this is the campaign broadcast, broadcast, broadcast. Everyone will understand it. Everyone will do it. And it’s like Chinese whispers. Bigger the organisation, the further you are away from the origin, the less difficult it is to make sure it’s the same. How often do we go back and say what have you heard? What are you taking away from that? What are you doing? What are your questions? And we could definitely do that better.

Yeah, brilliant. Great piece of advice. Before we go on to talk back up about Ignite, there was a session at Ignite that was very interesting, talking about the loss of cookies, and particularly, friends of ours at Funnel Fuel talking about what you can do and the need, the need to solve the problem about third-party data. And of course, overnight, the news has come out from Google that they are no longer going to enforce a cookie less future. They’re not going to kill off third party cookies, which is fine, except they are going to give people the option to opt in or opt out. We don’t know quite where it’s sitting at the moment, which means certainly in social media I can tell you when we watched Safari get knocked out of the game or, the fact that you have control over how much data was collected by apps on the Apple iOS, we saw massive chunks of change in terms of third-party data and what information we can get. I’d be really interested, you know, because obviously this is just new news today, what your thoughts are on the data we’re obsessing about as marketers.

This one for me is a little bit also in the world with AI. I think we’re all going to have a much better sense of what’s the value of our data, and we’ll be more thoughtful about what do we do with it because we all value it.

It’s a little bit like, you know, if you if you know what the value of a note is in a wallet, you’re not just going to chuck it in the street. You understand the value of it. When it’s digital and it’s not a physical thing, do you understand the value as much? Similarly, kind of where we are in a marketing world. In the past, we might not have cared. we might not have understood the value of what we were giving away when we said yes or no to cookies or yes or no to data being used in generative AI. When you start to think about, actually there’s two things – there’s the security of it. Am I giving something personal away? But there’s also what I’ve got is valuable and I could charge for it. I could, you know, pull in some money for giving it a transaction. And I think brands and marketers, we’re going to need to sort of say this is the value of what we’re giving to you. So, please say yes to that cookie or please do give that information in to the Gen AI tool, because in doing it, you’ll make what you get better. It’s like a survey. No one’s going to fill in a survey unless they’re going to potentially win a good prize, or it’s a brand you actually care about that you want to get better, or you really want to have a good rant. I really want to give you a one. I really want to slam you. You know, those are the only reasons you’re going to fill survey in. So, brands need to see what the value of the offer is when they’re asking for something. And we need to appreciate what are we going to get back and what’s the value of what we’re giving.

Yeah, yeah. Tejal?

You and I were talking about this earlier and I think I had a bit of a controversial opinion on it which I think cookies have made marketers a bit lazy and it’s a real fallback, isn’t it? I could just split who I want, I’m going to get a rough idea of the audience I’m going to target, and then I’m just going to use advertiser. And hey, Google is going to be my answer to that. I’m kind of disappointed that Google’s done the U-turn. Not surprised. I mean, they’re not going to risk their app revenue for what the feature was going to look like for them, so they’ve come up with this kind of middle ground. But I don’t think that means as organisations, as marketers, you should not, I think what you should be doing focusing on first-party data.

Yes.

There’s been a shift towards that for a while. I mean, you know, you try to protect all your other data, which your reporting, all your sales data you don’t want to share things with media agencies is more of a move towards going in-house with certain things, because it’s all about owning your data. Yeah, we’re reliant and happy to use third-party data when it comes to our marketing strategies. I think it’s a bit bonkers. I think you’ve got to have a really cohesive first-party data. What are you going to do to make it and I think back to what Scott said – what’s the value exchange there. Why is someone going to sign up with you or share their data with you? How are you using spaces like communities where you are creating an environment where your customers or potential customers, advocates of your brand can talk to each other and drive that engagement, drive some of the awareness, drive some of that thought leadership in a very different way to how we are relying on doing things, which is just right – I need this advertising. I’m going to buy this from vehicle. Here’s the check. Go make it happen. Finally, those audiences see that there is a there is space for some of that. And I think, Katy, you were saying earlier as well that how accurate some of that intent data that’s well the reliance on IP as well. Like people are working from home. Come on. And you’ve got hybrid. The IP piece of it, IP address isn’t always accurate either. So, we are all still fumbling a little bit in the dark. But if you own your data, you’ve got a strong data strategy. You know exactly who is, single source of truth in your organisation model. Mind you this was the Holy grail where I’ve just come from as well. It wasn’t happening. But that’s got to be your ambition is back to those foundations and your building blocks. You’ve got to focus on that at some point. Maybe, you know Google is going to get away with it now. But at some point, I think the rules are going to become much stricter. And this third-party idea is going to get taken away.

Yeah, I could not agree with you more and that I think, it’s music to my ears because there is so much that’s kind of smoke and mirrors about third-party data anyway, which is who are you really targeting? Who are these people that you assume are your buyers? But there’s no clarity on that. Sometimes the data does not reflect what you then see in terms of MQLs and SQLs. So, it’s an interesting one and I read an article the other day about intent data being just as wobbly as you rightly said. IP addresses are not fixed these days. It’s not quite as easy to pull that kind of data. So, I’m not suggesting for one minute we throw it all away. But I do think that if people are given the option to opt out or to not join or drop a cookie, they will do that. That’s exactly what we saw with Apple. It’s exactly what we saw when people are given the option to be more private, that’s exactly where they’ll go. So, either way, whether it’s we’re not quite falling off a cliff now in in spring next year. But it is, as I said to folks the other day, we are kind of tumbling down the hill. The third-party data is going to vanish. That just gives us more breathing space to start building our first-party data and trying to think, you know, I’ve been nearly 40 years in marketing, and when we started, we didn’t have anything like this. We didn’t have the internet. But it’s almost like we need to go back to thinking about how are we going to inform, educate and entertain our audiences so that we’re memorable, that where first thought, how do we do that? And getting ourselves back into that frame of mind, which frankly, is much more marketing fun than staring at spreadsheets of data in all honesty.

Okay, I’m going to make a prediction for a topic next year. So, Ignite next year, I think somebody is going to be starting to talk about synthetic data and particularly synthetic profiles and personas, where we’re taking the AI data and sort of extrapolating that to build audience sets and models that we can test on of literally synthetic audiences. And it’s a fairly new thing. But I think this time next year we’re going to see a bit more conversation about that.

You bet against us.

Yeah.

One of the founders for LinkedIn, set up a separate company and Mark Ritson, I think is one of the advisors on it, purely as an organisation that is offering that synthetic data so definitely it’s a hot topic.

Wow, I’m going to have to look at it. Yeah, that’s a new one on me. So, I don’t know about you, but I think we all chatted with everybody in the breaks during the conference. Was there anything that your fellow marketeers were, talking about? What do you think are the biggest challenges as, you know, as we were heading into H2 and wrapping up what has been quite a grim old year so far. What was a lot of things that of bubbling up from other marketeers?

We’ve talked about it a bit already, but it is that about brand versus demand tension. The how do I deliver something now and with, you know, the budget I don’t have. Also, make sure I’m not ghosting my prospects in the future. And that I think is still a big challenge to try to solve the balance of those two.

Yeah. Tejal?

Yeah. I think, look, the economic environment we’ve been in, I think that post-Covid bubble, certainly the tech bubble burst again and you’ve got some very challenging, situations for organisations. And of course, when that happens, it is just about showing the numbers, showing the revenue. And I think it’s a real shame that’s that. Of course, that’s our job as marketers. But we’re not doing the longer-term stuff, which is worrying me a little bit as we all become and live in a much more competitive space. How do you have that stand up and cut through? How are you going to retain for the longer run? What happens to lifecycle marketing? All of that? I feel like that’s in danger of being lost. And then what are the what’s going to be the impact of that in the long term with the investment you’re going to have to make constantly focus on that lower funnel. I think it was a slightly more detailed conversation but after my session with Rob Gold and the whole superpowers thing, someone came up to me and one of the conversations that we had is the challenge that that person had. I can’t remember the company they were at, but the challenge that they had within their organisation, it was a large organisation when it comes to content, which is often dictated by other teams, comes from a brand, team or something. And I think everything we’ve talked about today and thought leadership and that 95% – 5% need the importance of building trust, all of that requires the right content. And I think that the bigger company, as I, you know, I’m jealous of the smaller companies where you’ve got all of that control within your team, you are churning up the content, you’re publishing it, you’re getting it out there. But I think for the likes of Scott and I, who’ve come from the big enterprise companies, content’s been created in some bubble elsewhere and how do you influence those people? So that was a very interesting conversation that I think is a valid one for a lot of people.

Yes. And often content is created with a view of content. First, you know, we’ll do a video, we’ll create a carousel, we’ll do that.

We see thousands, hundreds of videos.

Yeah.

Why? Why?

Well, what you should be is audience-first, you know, I mean, so, you know what you’ve got is people producing content, who have not spoken to a customer. Just to loop back to what you said, Scott, right at the beginning – if we don’t know who the buyers are, oh, well, what are we producing content?

Well, it comes back to the point, Tajel was just making, it’s about that measurement. I can prove I made something tick. I’ve done something good as a marketer, but that’s like a what I call a watermelon result. It’s green on the outside, but when you dig into it, it’s red because it might have been completely pointless for your target market, or they might have completely ignored it or not followed the CTA and done something completely different. So, if you do focus on those measures two carefully you force bad behaviour because what’s measured or rewarded gets done. And if you’re only measuring things that aren’t very good, not very good things get done a lot.

It’s really interesting isn’t? Because we see that across the board. You know I’m thinking of the NHS, you set bed targets, What’s what gets done. If you set arrest targets for the police that’s what gets that does not actually mean that the quality of what’s being done is done. The targets are being met and this is just a natural human instinct that’s what we do. It’s no blame is attached to it. It’s just we need to think a little bit more deeply. We’re running out of time, so, and I can talk to you two for hours, because, honestly, there’s so much. I’m already going watermelon, synthetic, first-party data, all about culture. My brain is fizzy. If there was one piece of advice that you would give to a colleague and there’s so much, we could talk about. But one piece of advice. It has been a tough year for marketeers. One piece of advice from the conference. What would it be?

I would say B2B buyers are behaving more like B2C buyers, so don’t work in a bubble. I think you start looking outside your own industry, gain knowledge and learnings on how to engage with your customers over the longer term. There’s one more thing. You aren’t just a demand engine as a marketer, you’re responsible for engaging with your customer throughout the life cycle. And really, I think we should all have an ambition to turn all of our customers into advocates so that they can influence new buyers. That should be the kind of ambition we have, because that’s true life cycle marketing.

Lovely!

Scott?

So, I’m going to add, add a new friend into your network, which is you’ll see CHRO. The couple of the sessions that I attended, both brought out the fact that we talk a lot about the commercial marketer, and you need to understand the finances. You need to understand the operations. And we absolutely do need to do that but Tejal, you made the point in your research that one of the three most important kind of buying, sort of deciding factors was how a company treats its people. And I think in an organisation as marketing, understanding how HR can be your partner to sort of make sure the board understand what you do, but equally make sure that everyone in marketing and it goes back to sort of that culture side of things, everybody gets what the brand is. Everybody understands how they can work with each other. So, sort of bit of a Venn diagram. So, my Venn diagram number one side would be HR. The other one would be: get close to your customer. You know, when was the last time you spent time with your customer or as close as you can possibly get, because it’s too easy in the sort of demand-based world, we’re in, and looking at lots of metrics improving, we’re doing the right thing. You just churn, churn and churn stuff out, thinking they’ll love it, they’ll love it, they’ll love it. I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it. Tick the box. And the more you do it, the more myopic you get. I think it’s myopic when you don’t see as much, and you lose sight of who are you doing this for and what is it doing to you? And I think both of those things need some more attention.

Spot on, spot on. That for me. I think that it’s about, prioritising, looking longer term. Not just what’s happening next month and helping your leadership team understand what that means, so that hopefully 2025 is amazing. Thank you so much, Tejal and Scott. You’ve been just fabulous.

It’s just, my brain is buzzing. It really is. Even more so than when I came out of B2B Ignite. It’s just there’s so much we’ve got to do. And that’s exciting for me. I love it when we can learn so much from each other and to what our view is. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining today. Please do keep asking questions in comments. We will come back, visit them, answer, let you know what was going on there. There are some summaries being written about the event, so we’ll share those. And I know that, Joel, who is the editor-in chief B2B marketing, was not able to join us today but he has also written some really good summaries, and I’ll pop those in the comments. So, until next time, keep innovating and keep breaking the social boring. Speak to you all soon.