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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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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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I used to drive a BMW and tried to buy a new one. Easier said than done. This story is a bit about money, it’s a bit about customer service, but that’s not the thing. The thing is about Brand Reputation. I expected more from the BMW brand. If this experience is typical of the brand’s values, I don’t imagine it will be long before we’re all walking away. If I was the person responsible for maintaining the BMW brand reputation I’d be more than a little concerned.

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Crowdsourcing broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. The principal can be applied to any challenge where many hands can make light work. It’s a bit of a big deal. One that the B2B marketing community has thus far almost wholly ignored. Brands aren’t about guidelines or products or services, they’re about feelings. Rather than being restricted to the views of a few you can open up the brand discussion to the prospective customers.

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