What is the core of the brand breakthrough strategy of the To B industry?

The influence of brands has been weak for a long time. The real situation of the To B industry

In recent years, with the vigorous development of the Internet, people in the consumer field have fully felt the important value of the Internet to brand marketing and its role in promoting user value. A large number of excellent companies have leveraged the Internet model to rapidly gain recognition from Chinese users and widespread social awareness, becoming well-known brands. For example, Didi , Mobike , and ofo in the transportation field, Xiaomi in the smart hardware field, Meituan , Ele.me, and Baidu Takeout in the o2o service field are all typical excellent companies that have achieved brand value with the help of the Internet.

However, these companies all have one common feature, which is that they are basically consumer-oriented, that is, the toC field. However, in the toB field, which is aimed at the industry level, it seems that brand marketing has not made much progress. The focus of the Internet's transformation of the toB field is still reflected in the product and service models, but for brand marketing, there is not much improvement and help.

In fact, in our economic life, the toB field is a very large field, and its complexity and diversity are even much higher than the market targeting consumer groups. However, because they do not directly conduct brand marketing and promotion to the market and the public, in our perception, they are always in the image of brand divers. At least in the market, there are only a handful of toB companies that can gain extremely high visibility in the public domain.

Therefore, the brands of the toB industry generally leave people with the following impressions: the industry is heavy, the work is rustic, the concepts and thinking are backward, the brand is low, the market relations are complex, the general brand creativity is particularly difficult to control, the brand influence is extremely difficult to create, and the true brand value is difficult to reflect.

Some people in the industry say that it is very necessary for the toB industry to do brand and new media promotion, but this is just correct nonsense without any practical value. In fact, who doesn’t know that brand and marketing promotion are very important?

However, when faced with such a complex industry, most brand marketers are actually helpless due to lack of professional knowledge, which also leads to a large number of brand people disdain to work in this industry. This also leads to a severe shortage of brand talents in the toB industry, and brand building in most companies is implemented part-time by administrative or other departments.

Industry characteristics and marketing logic: the unique situation of To B industry brand building

This situation is determined by the characteristics of the industry. ToB companies often do not directly target the general public and consumers with their products. Most of them act as supply chains for market- and consumer-oriented companies, or they directly provide services and products to enterprise-level customers, government organizations, social organizations, and specific groups in society. Although they may be widely used in their fields, it is difficult for consumers to perceive and know them.

In the field of brand marketing, due to the great particularity and unique logic of the tob industry, the model of uniqueness and value consideration in brand marketing, market promotion , and new media operations is different from that in the general consumer field. Those new media marketing strategies and brand advertising strategies that we are familiar with and can instantly sweep the screen often fail to gain wide recognition in the toB industry, and have no way to help companies achieve value. What’s more important is that this toC industry thinking is not suitable for application in the toB industry. So a sentence I often hear in the advertising circle is: the toB industry is a forbidden zone for advertising creatives.

This dilemma is actually a reflection of the true market value and a reproduction of the actual market trading conditions. When an enterprise or organization selects its strategic partners, they often do so based on the dimensions of brand value, marketing promotion, and actual application areas of the enterprise. Among them, the actual application dimension accounts for the vast majority of cooperation content in the toB industry.

Since actual value and effectiveness are the most important aspects of corporate cooperation, companies in the toB industry pay more attention to their own products and services and their reputation in the industry, but do not pay much attention to relatively abstract content such as brand.

Imagine that a company needs to build a building. When it is looking for a partner to produce heavy products such as cement and steel bars, the most important thing it will consider is the quality of its cement and steel bars, and whether the companies have used them in other engineering projects. However, it does not care at all about its brand influence or the degree of consumer recognition of its products.

For these companies, they do not need to be evaluated by the market and consumers. All they need to do is to fully play their role in their field.

Therefore, it is understandable that they do not attach importance to the packaging of brand image, do not attach importance to brand promotion , and have a nonchalant attitude towards new media marketing. Because these things may not necessarily directly promote the increase in product sales, nor are they conducive to the performance of its ultimate market value.

Traditional brand marketing theories and new media marketing strategies commonly used in the market obviously lack value and effectiveness in the B-end market.

Four cases and one model: Rethinking the brand strategy of the To B industry

For brand building in the toB industry, the best model is definitely not the C-end influence model of traditional marketing, but rather a global industry thinking based on industry characteristics. We must stand at a higher dimension to think about the key points and construction center of B-end brand building. In order to explain this model, we will give special examples of the achievements made by four toB brands (industries) in brand marketing construction, as well as the model analysis that they ultimately bring to us.

The first case is Intel , which is well-known to everyone.

Intel is a high-tech chip company whose main product is the computer central processing unit that we are very familiar with. Almost every one of us has to deal with their products. Although we cannot see its true appearance every day, we know that in most of the computers we use, there are Intel central processing units silently serving us. At the same time, in actual sales, Intel is actually a typical toB enterprise, and most of its products are sold directly to Lenovo, Dell, and Apple Computer.

But why are we so familiar with such a brand?

Although Intel is engaged in a toB business, its brand influence reaches consumers directly. Intel has done a lot of branding work, directly targeting the general public, fully demonstrating the powerful performance of the central processing unit and what kind of difficulties and problems it can help users solve, so that users have a deep understanding of their products.

Intel has also fully integrated with its B-side enterprises to establish a brand joint marketing model, which shows us that in the market, no matter how big the computer brand is, when they are conducting brand marketing, they must once again emphasize to consumers that the chips they use are from Intel, which can effectively and fully meet users' requirements for computer performance.

Through effective advertising and brand promotion strategies , Intel tells computer product consumers about its own advantages, allowing consumers to trust computers with Intel chips more when choosing products in the market, forcing computer manufacturers to purchase more Intel chips to meet consumer perceptions; at the same time, through joint marketing, it further strengthens its status in the industry. The brand marketing strategy built by Intel in the PC era has achieved great success. We can call this brand model the "Brand Marketing BBC Model"

The second case is the famous German Zeiss optics

Many people who often wear glasses or are very interested in photography and videography know this optical brand. The once-popular Nokia mobile phones also use this brand as their lenses. In their own industrial construction and brand marketing, most of their products are actually sold mainly to the B-end market, rather than directly to the C-end market. His lenses are used in a large number of high-precision equipment, and some have become high-end eyeglass lenses.

However, in Zeiss's own brand marketing, it is not completely confined to toB, but influences end consumers through various channels, fully telling market users about the high-end and excellence of its products, allowing many people to have a high degree of trust in Zeiss, and also making consumers believe that only products with Zeiss are good high-end products when they are looking for related products. It is precisely this kind of influence that makes many businesses, when selling products to C-end consumers, spare no effort to tell consumers that the products I provide to you include products from German Zeiss, which means that my product quality and service quality are of high standard and first-class.

The third case is some internationally renowned bathroom brands.

Because there are many brands in this field, I will not mention their names one by one, but the brand marketing strategies implemented by these bathroom brands are worth our careful consideration. With the advent of the era of overall home decoration and the highlighting of the value of designers in high-end spaces, the market sales of many well-known bathroom brands today are actually dominated by B-end business. But on the one hand, they still placed a large number of advertisements in the market targeting ordinary consumers, but at the same time they also carried out a lot of promotion and publicity targeting interior designers, developers, decoration companies, etc.

Driven by this, these bathroom brands have established a very high reputation in the entire market, so that when designers and decoration companies introduce the high-end nature of their products to owners, they always say that the bathroom of a certain well-known brand will be used in the plan. The bathroom brand has expanded its influence among the general public, and has also rapidly expanded its market channels and influence to B-side areas such as designers and decoration companies, completing the construction of the BBC model and ultimately forming an effective and outstanding market influence.

The fourth case is Foxconn , which we are all very familiar with.

Foxconn is a typical manufacturing company, widely known for its OEM business. Many well-known smartphones such as the iPhone and many digital products are all produced by Foxconn. It can be said that many products produced by Foxconn have appeared in our daily lives.

But we also know that from the perspective of industrial value and the location of the industrial chain, Foxconn is a genuine toB enterprise. In terms of direct value and interest connection, it actually does not have much to do with the majority of consumers. But why is this brand so famous and even became a social phenomenon that attracted attention from the whole of China and even the world?

In fact, Foxconn has always attached great importance to building its own brand and has a clear and precise strategy. It is by no means a company that becomes famous overnight simply because of some negative social news. Foxconn has the world's leading production process technology and scientific production management system. Although it has millions of workers, Foxconn does not label itself as a traditional factory. Instead, it has made its brand more high-tech by co-branding with well-known global high-tech companies such as Apple.

More importantly, today Foxconn has become a truly globalized enterprise. In the globalized economic landscape, Foxconn participates in the division of labor in the global industrial chain with its high-quality products and technology, grows together with the globalized industry, and becomes an unparalleled excellent brand in the B-end market. Moreover, many of the products it produces are directly provided to the general public, allowing people to have a better understanding of this industry and factory. In addition, the company's leader, Mr. Terry Gou, has always been a well-known figure in the business community. This series of factors has led to Foxconn's unprecedented influence in the B-end channel field and its influence on the general public and consumers.

BBC's operation and construction model is an important guarantee for the success of B-side enterprise brands

Through the introduction of these cases, do you have a very basic understanding of brand building in the toB industry? From Intel, Zeiss to Foxconn, we found that compared with ordinary market brands, toB brand building is more difficult, the environment is more complex, the system requirements are higher, the professional challenges are greater, and the requirements for creativity and innovation are also extreme. Brands often need to be built in both directions and in leaps and bounds.

Generally speaking, for products sold to the consumer market, most of the core actions of brand building can be completed as long as the brand is promoted to the mass market.

So in this sense, when building the brand of a B-end enterprise, we must consider not only the feelings of C-end users, but also the influence of B-end partners on them. At the same time, we must also consider that when necessary, we must face the mass market together with our partners and build brand joint marketing.

The key to B-end brands and new breakthroughs lies in whether they can complete the construction of brand influence under the BBC model, and achieve common brand value-added in a targeted manner for enterprises in the industry they serve. At the same time, they must be good at expressing their advantages to the mass market, allowing the entire market to endorse their credit, which in turn will promote more B-end enterprises to be willing to cooperate with them.

In fact, it is not that B-side enterprises have no way to build their brands, but that the traditional brand marketing mindset and commonly used technical strategies cannot effectively solve the brand implementation under such multi-dimensional requirements. For example, we are very vague about how B-side enterprises implement brand communication for C-side mass users. We always think that because the product cannot be felt by the general public, it cannot directly have a positive impact on the market. In fact, there are many ways for a company to have a positive impact on the entire market, such as social welfare activities, sponsorship activities, commercial packaging of corporate leaders, etc.

Brand joint marketing activities are a very nice thing, both for yourself and the cooperating enterprises. Why do most computer companies still mention that their computers use Intel CPUs when they recommend them today? This is because whether it is a B-side partner brand or for ordinary users, Intel has become a high-tech synonym for familiar, trusted and high-quality products in the minds of the public.

If we look at the market, many people say that B-side companies do not know how to do brand marketing and building. In fact, this is a statement that shows a lack of deep understanding of the industrial brand model. Most of the excellent B-end companies can do a very good job of branding themselves in ordinary channel promotion , but the B-end brand is not a single brand in essence. Most companies have not done enough in terms of direct promotion and joint marketing, and they have not even recognized it.

As the Internet continues to develop in depth, we believe that the B-end brand market will become larger and larger, and more and more B-end companies will take the BBC brand model as the core and strive to create Chinese brands with global value.