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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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Honda has been undertaking extensive testing of sales people and customers within dealerships to monitor changes they go through during the process of buying a car. Customers are most relaxed when dealing with a sales person who delivers exactly the customer experience they say they’re going to, but research shows that the customer is most excited about their purchase about 10 minutes before the sales person. In a B2B context, Brand guardians would do well to ensure their brand promise is properly aligned to the customer expectation.

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Businesses have the opportunity to communicate a message or multiple messages with their audiences every day. It’s important to communicate the ‘right’ messages, obviously. But it’s equally important to ensure that the message, however ‘right’, doesn’t just become wallpaper, repeated parrot-fashion because no one’s asked the questions, ‘why are we saying this, why do we keep saying this and what do our customers think when we keep saying this?’

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It’s perhaps worth remembering at this seasonal time of festive joy and goodwill to all men that Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola. Well, OK, maybe not ‘invented’, but the perception we have of the jolly, rotund, fellow in a red suit with white flowing beard – the Santa ‘brand’ – is effectively Coke’s.
From [...]

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I had a conversation with a sage and wizened marketing impresario recently and he asked (out of politeness, rather than because it really made any material difference to him) how the business was progressing. He was obviously aware that we had moved our offices into central London and I explained that such a move couldn’t [...]

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This is a service industry. Birddog is a service company. We provide professional services. Not products. Not widgets that can be picked off the shelf, inspected, weighed, price-checked, scanned and paid for at the checkout.
Service companies provide bespoke, specialist, professional services where no two requirements are ever the same. Every client is different, every solution [...]

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