B2B marketing has never understood the customer

If it wants a more influential seat at the table, it's the biggest thing that will have to change

A.G. Lafley’s Playing to Win is one of my all-time favorite business books. One of things that stuck with me from it was that he considered understanding the customer one of the core, differentiated capabilities of P&G. It’s a great aspiration for any company and raises interesting questions about the investments, behaviors and programs that might constitute a legitimate market advantage in customer intelligence.

In most B2C companies, it is marketing and advertising that creates and acts upon this competitive advantage. Most of the intellectual foundation of marketing and advertising comes from the world of B2C. And it is this version of marketing that is taught is business schools and that finds its way to popular media via shows like Mad Men.

But the truth is that B2B marketing has never played this role in the corporation.

B2B marketers are often one of the roles furthest away from the customer. The CEO. Sales. Product. Design. Customer Success. Support. All these functions spend significantly more time with customers than marketing does.

B2B marketers also rarely relate to the products they are marketing in the way they might for consumer products like cars, soap, cereal or anything where they are a potential target audience. If you are a B2B marketer and selling tools to engineers, software to finance professionals or healthcare plans to HR, it’s legitimately very hard to understand what’s going to resonate with that audience and why.

We’re not talking about the cognitive leap to understand why one brand of paper towels might outperform another. We’re talking about understanding the pain points of skilled professionals that might devote an entire career to one domain area. They know the area better than you do, by a lot. They are more familiar with the tools than you are. They use them more than you do.

B2B marketers haven’t figured out how to close this gap and it’s why the 4 Ps of product, price, place and promotion has just never been a relevant construct for B2B marketing. It’s not even true for all B2C marketing (the marketing team at Apple is not making the key product decisions on iPhone), but it’s definitely not true for B2B.

One way of looking at this is that marketing at B2B companies is a shell of what it does at B2C. Another perspective is that the world of B2B is vastly more complicated and specialized than B2C and, as a result, the four Ps is just way too much scope to live in one discipline. It’s naturally distributed across product management, design, engineering, sales and channel, marketing and finance.

The problem isn’t marketing, it’s that the four Ps aren’t a legitimate construct for more complicated business and marketing shouldn’t feel some particular shame that it doesn’t own the decision making associated with nearly every critical function of the business.

My personal opinion is that the world of promotion is vast. And it makes sense for B2B marketers to feel comfortable owning that domain and not worrying about the fact that they don’t own pricing.

But in order to be effective at promotion, marketers still must understand their audience. And if they truly understand their audience, and their market, they would own their piece of the business but become vastly more influential in areas like product and pricing.

Which brings us back to the original problem, which is that marketers don’t understand their audience, market and even product.

I plan to write more about this in a following piece, but many B2B marketers have lost the plot on analytics and insight. I’ll hear people say that they don’t have time for analytics work because they are so busy. Everyone is busy but if you aren’t personally making the time to better understand your audience and market, you’re making a personal decision about the role you will play in the company. You can drive the conversation and execution around promotion but that’s where your role begins and ends.

If you want more, developing real mastery of the audience and market is the only way. It requires real personal investment.

And the hill you have to climb for it to matter is not just having mastery of trivially simple funnel KPIs, it’s knowing enough about your audience and market to directly challenge your sales and product teams on a business topic (not tactical channel execution) and win the argument on the merits.

If you are comfortable with the status quo, no change required. If you want a different seat at the table, look at your functional peers around the table (sales, product, etc) and set a different bar for yourself. Take back the crown as the function that understands the customer and the market the best.