Placing a clear customer promise at the heart of campaigns strategies – chiefly a promise that is memorable, deliverable, and valuable – is more likely to bear brand building and commercial rewards in B2B marketing than B2C, according to a new whitepaper released by WARC Advisory in partnership with The B2B Institute, LinkedIn’s marketing think tank, and strategy expert Roger Martin.
Based on an analysis of 700 global B2B campaigns from North America, Europe, MENA, and Asia, the report focuses explicitly on understanding the value of customer promises in B2B advertising to drive impact across key brand and business metrics. The report features successful B2B campaigns from brands such as Procell, Workday, Sage, and Amazon India that make a clear promise to the customer.
The reports reveals that B2B campaigns that made a promise to the customer are nearly three times more likely to report increases in market share than those that did not. They also appeared more likely to report increases in market penetration (44 per cent vs 36 per cent) and revenue (30 per cent vs 20 per cent).
Impact on brand health
Customer promise campaigns in B2B are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to report on brand health shifts than non-customer promise campaigns. Almost half (47 per cent) of the B2B customer promise campaigns that were analysed delivered a meaningful uplift in key brand health measures such as consideration, preference, purchase intent and perceived quality. This compares to just 19 per cent of non-customer promise campaigns, showing that in B2B, customer promises are almost three times as likely to deliver a meaningful impact than non-customer promise campaigns.
Paul Stringer, Managing Editor, Research & Advisory at WARC, said, “Customer promises can make brands familiar by being memorable, valuable and deliverable. They can cut through the noise and the messiness of decision making by offering a clear and simple articulation of the value delivered by a brand to its customers. It sounds simple, but of course, there is a huge amount of work involved in designing and projecting a clear Promise to the Customer.”
Customer promise campaigns for tight budgets
Research also showed that B2B Customer promise campaigns appeared to be disproportionately effective at the lower end of the creative commitment scale (a composite of budget size, campaign duration and number of channels deployed to drive effectiveness with scores ranging from 3 to a maximum of 15), an important insight for organisations with smaller marketing budgets.
Clearly, customer promise campaigns in B2B work particularly hard when budgets are tight customer promises in B2B deliver valuable advantages for scale-up brands or businesses with limited marketing resources.
Mimi Turner, Head of EMEA & Latin America at the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, said: “The great problem for marketers is not that they don’t know what to do. It is that often, they don’t have the money to do it. The huge advantage of putting a clear promise of value at the heart of a campaign is that marketers are virtually guaranteed to get better results without spending any extra money. Marketing is expensive. Customer promises are free. The findings show that lower budget B2B customer promise campaigns are 1.7x more likely to increase brand health and 2.7x more likely to increase market share than higher budget ones. For the first time, we are able to offer an effectiveness strategy that is budget-neutral and enhances meaningful marketing metrics.”
More effective than any other brand promise?
The report also highlighted that customer promises are much less common in B2B: Only 18 per cent of B2B campaigns make a promise to the customer, compared to 40 per cent of B2C campaigns. Fewer than one in five (18 per cent) B2B campaigns made a promise to the customer, regardless of whether the objective was brand building or activation.
This is significantly lower than the 40 per cent of B2C campaigns that made a promise to the customer, highlighted in previous research. Given that B2B purchases are often high-consideration / high-risk, and lead to a relatively long-term relationship between buyer and vendor, this infrequency is surprising. It suggests that making a customer promise could represent a competitive opportunity for B2B brands.
Jann Martin Schwarz, Founder at The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, added: “Brand is not just a “nice-to-have,” it is an essential full-funnel deal-closing advantage. And, while there are many definitions of ‘brand,’ making a clear promise of value to your customers is the most effective way to build your brand. Our research conclusively finds that across every category, a customer promise is far more effective than any other kind of brand promise. Our findings reveal that B2B campaigns that make a customer promise are 3x more likely to deliver increases in market share, and 2.5x more likely to deliver increases in brand health.”
Roger Martin, CEO Advisor, Strategist and Author of “Playing to Win”, concluded: “Making a customer promise in a B2B campaign is much more important and impactful than in a B2C campaign – across all important dimensions of performance. Yet the vast majority of B2B advertising campaigns are designed to be ineffective. And that creates a doom-loop.”
