How to avoid mediocre B2B marketing with Boring2Brave author Mark Choueke
B2B marketing is different, we’ve been told. It has always come across as serious, unemotive, dry and rational compared to B2C marketing. But why can’t it be fun and imaginative? Mark Choueke is the author of Boring2Brave, a new book that makes the business and cultural case for more bravery in B2B marketing. Mark knows the sector inside out with a 20-year career in global B2B marketing and communications, including three years as the editor of Marketing Week magazine. Jude Bliss chats to Mark about what led him to write the book and how B2B marketers can create the best conditions to break free from the tyranny of mediocrity and embrace the ‘bravery-as-strategy’ mindset.
Boring2Brave: The ‘bravery-as-a-strategy’ mindset that’s transforming B2B marketing
Hey Mark. What is the central question that your book Boring2Brave sets out to answer?
The central question is, why do we ‘settle’? B2B marketing can and should do better, yet we settle for vast, ugly, grey mediocrity. The book is about how do you do better for your company whilst doing better for marketing as a discipline? Whilst, by the way, also doing better for you; raising your profile and ensuring you have more influence and probably a better career. If you can genuinely prove that you’re helping your business stand out, get liked, get remembered and get bought, you get paid better, but you’ll get to have more fun at work too.
So why does B2B marketing settle? Why is it often so boring, do you think?
Firstly, there’s a lot of legacy. There’s an assumption that there is no room or role to play for creativity, memorability, characters, or humour. In very business-like terms of old, those behaviours must feel like frivolity; like an inappropriate tone of voice, but there’s a science out there that says different. There’s a lot of data and studies showing that B2B marketing is actually more like B2C marketing than we think it is, in terms of how we can use creativity, emotion, all of those things. The problem comes when you assume that having a good enough product or a brilliant enough idea is enough. It really isn’t.
Mark Choueke: “There’s an assumption that there is no role to play for creativity or memorability in B2B marketing”
Why should B2B brands be brave? Why is being ‘brave’ the ambition and not being ‘interesting’, for instance?
Bravery spreads; it’s contagious. Being brave at work gives your colleagues the permission and opportunity to do the same. Equally, a lack of bravery spreads. Craven behaviour spreads like a disease through huge organisations and relationships. Bravery resonates with the human being, but you often only appreciate it when you see it. So something like floating that helium-filled balloon of Donald Trump over London on his first presidential visit to the UK. It’s like, are we really going to put the US president in a nappy and fly him over the city while he’s here? Doesn’t he have armed guards? Aren’t we going to get into trouble? But when you do it, people look up, and they can’t help themselves. They immediately start clapping or laughing or start filming on their phones. Bravery genuinely resonates with the human soul.
What are some of your favourite examples of bravery from the book?
There’s a story in the book about a North London tube station I used to frequent on the way home from work. And this tube station was in an area well-known for trouble and being a dangerous place to be at night. There were always notices up from the police asking for witnesses and information to awful occurrences. It was a horrible place to be. Then one day, the station quickly solved the problem. The boardroom discussion to solve that problem probably would have been to try to find some money to hire private security or go to the council and see if they could get more police on patrol. That would have been expensive and difficult. They didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, the station bought a CD player and played classical music through the station. It’ s not the sort of solution that you can easily pitch to a boardroom. But it worked. There was this beautiful classical music piping through, and people came up onto the concourse and slowed down and looked at each other and smiled, and nobody was in a hurry. I don’t know if it’s because someone found that it’s physically impossible to mug another human being to the sound of Ave Maria. But it really did work. There’s a creative solution to everything.
In terms of B2B examples, Cheetah Digital in the US held its annual conference ‘Signals’ online in October last year. Instead of producing adverts, with some of its big-name speakers including Seth Godin and Jay Baer, they chose Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and his wife and actor Brittany Furlan. And they made a series of hilarious ads on YouTube. In one, she dresses up as Seth Godin and pretends to play the saxophone like Kenny G. They’re worth watching, and for a digital experience platform to use that kind of online advertising, just breaks with every single convention of the slick boredom-driven content that we see out there for marketing conferences. It was just brilliant.
But the bravest piece of B2B marketing I was personally ever involved with took me to Salt Lake City in Utah to invade an Adobe summit full of our potential customers with 25 Frankenstein monsters. We hired an Airbnb and 25 actors with a movie makeup crew that started working on the guys at four in the morning, both days. We fed them and trained them into being charming and hilarious rather than scary and threatening outside an Adobe summit. The full story is in the book. The idea was to win over some people before they passed through the doors of the conference centre to drink the kool-aid of our competitor in Adobe. It was a crazy idea that came from our CEO. And it was probably one of the best ROI generating exercises or activities I’ve ever been involved in. It wasn’t even just the ROI; it was that sense of galvanization that we felt as a company that year. Not only did our customers really want to talk to us about Dumpfrank.com - the name of the campaign, but it also gave us the sense that ‘this is how brave we can be now; this is the way we can do marketing’.
Qubit’s Frankenstein monsters from its ‘Dump Frank’ campaign at the Adobe summit.
What should B2B companies invest in and commit to? What should they sacrifice?
Great question. Sacrifice volume of marketing. Most B2B content marketers get measured in units of deliverables. Twenty blog posts a year, for instance, or three email campaigns per quarter and a content calendar full of dates and times. That says nothing about the message they’re going to put out there. Those are delivery channels but they need to carry something special in there - a terrific story or message - to catch the eye. I’ve got a whole bunch of emails in my inbox right now that I will never read. I glance at the subject headers and think, ‘boy you really mistargeted with me’. So B2B needs to sacrifice volume and replace it with time and care and a story and craft and skills in putting that story together in a fabulous way, whether it’s a podcast, a newsletter or some video. I also think B2B needs to replace safety with risk. It needs to stop counting efficiencies and start changing behaviours and perceptions. Companies need to sacrifice comfort for discomfort. Discomfort isn’t always bad; marketers should enjoy it.
What three bits of advice do you have for B2B marketers?
Stop operating in fear. That comes with a decision; I’m not going to be scared anymore, and I’m going to put my best foot forward.
Learn your discipline. If you’re going to assert your expertise, feel qualified, feel armed, so learn marketing.
And finally, know that flaws can be universally appealing and attractive. It’s the same reason I can while away hours on the toilet watching YouTube videos of outtakes and bloopers from all my favourite shows. And there’s a reason why Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David and the cast of Friends all put blooper reels out there. They don’t put it out there because they want to show how things screwed up. They put it out there because they know it’s content that will get watched and loved and shared. Those bloopers and those flaws show real moments, and there’s not enough real people and real moments in B2B marketing.
Boring2Brave: The ‘bravery-as-a-strategy’ mindset that’s transforming B2B marketing by Mark Choueke is available now.
