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For brands to remain relevant over time, they have to evolve, change, reinvent, ‘rebrand’. Keep the good, throw out the bad. It’s not something that has to happen every year, but it should happen with significant shifts in the market, in personnel, in the business and in the audience.

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It’s possible I was wrong. It’s possible that the work didn’t answer the brief. It’s even possible that it just wasn’t good enough. But that’s not the point. The point, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is that you have to believe. Not a little, not a lot. You have to BELIEVE with every single fibre in your body. Because no one else will. Least of all the client. Believe it, live it and hang up on any mutthafuggah who isn’t prepared to die for the cause.

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The B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in the mobile market development. It’s not a difficult (or budget-breaking) problem to solve. If you do nothing else in the next 12 months, fix your content for mobile delivery – you can do it with one call, from your mobile. And if you don’t, just remember that your customers are already engaging with those that have.

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The very reason that companies invest in their brands and the supporting digital channels of communication is to shape perceptions in the minds of their audiences. Brands aren’t ‘things’, brands are what people, customers, ‘think’. Brands are the experiences people have and the stories, like this one, they tell other people. In our digital world, those stories can travel a long way. BA fundamentally failed to manage my customer experience and, in the absence of any other input, they have allowed me to form my own perceptions of the brand. So that’s what I’ve done.

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It struck me that digital isn’t our future anymore, it’s now an intrinsic part of our daily (working) lives. We can look to the future, but it’s pretty much already here. Even if we don’t use the tools, the machine, the ‘matrix’ indexes the information anyway. There is no escape. But however exciting the B2B future could be, the limited budget is almost always spent on what is probable and known rather than what might be possible, and unknown.

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The sticking point in B2B Social Media, seemingly, is measurement. When you can prove it, then we’ll think about it. Well, I for one, am bored. I’m bored telling companies that they have to actively engage with social media for their brand to remain relevant in a digital economy and I’m bored listening to agencies pretending they have measurement matrices that prove they know what the customer’s doing.

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I was forced to concede and call the parking hotline when I parked my car. I assumed that every mobile transaction would be simple. But why on earth would life be that simple? If there had been a mobile internet application, the whole transaction could have been so much easier. Which means there’s an opportunity, and a danger, for brands engaging in the mobile space.

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Some years ago, a pimply-nerdy-geek-type told me that traditional B2B communications were dead and that the future was digital. I guffawed, spluttered and muttered outrageousnesses then lay down in a darkened room to sniff some well earned printed collateral. But just because you don’t like it or are unfamiliar with the territory, doesn’t mean it isn’t so. There are some home truths about online brands that every B2B marketer needs to face, and at the moment, they’re not.

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Whilst clearly not first to the bar at the SmartPhone party, I find myself fully committed to the future of mobile internet delivery. It’s an area of the marketing mix that has been woefully underexploited in the business community, but it’s OK, you can relax, I’m going to fix that.

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