Those talking to people at work have to be extra careful because their communications activity makes demands on their prospects’ valuable time. There’s always a danger of seeming intrusive or self-serving. So how can b2b brands use social media well? Here are three ways.

1. As a brand-building tool, to demonstrate expertise and build connection. Be relevant and interesting, and you can still land a strong message. Salesforce does this well by telling the stories of individual users and how Salesforce has changed their lives. Engaging human interest stories with a clear product benefit built in. Less direct routes also work. Marketing automation brand Marketo posts inspirational quotes with the hashtag WednesdayWisdom. Think people have had enough of inspirational quotes? Then consider creating a club of people with a shared interest, whether it’s gorgeous food or 100 ways to clear a paper jam. A brand which understands what matters to its customers builds credibility and trust. American Express’s OPEN Forum is about whatever small businesses might find useful, indirectly delivering the message that Amex understands and assists people to do business.

2. When there’s something new to say that people will want to hear. Maybe it’s a genuine breakthrough, or industry news, or something mundane but helpful, such as a special offer. That’s no different from any good advertising brief. In that situation, why be limited to social media alone? If it’s worth saying, it’s worth making sure the message lands. That probably means multiple channels.

Some businesses steer clear of anything overtly commercial on social channels, instead showcasing sustainability efforts, charitable work, or other employee activities to build their reputation. No need for such coyness. If it’s worth saying, it’s worth spending money to get the word out to the right people. Conversely, commercial news and offers may well be of interest and value to the customer. The test should be, what might a customer want to know, and should it come from us? Mutual benefit is fine. You are in business, after all.

3. As a two-way channel. Social media is, well, social – people can talk to a business and to each other. It’s essential to have resources and policies in place to deal with incoming and shared communication. This can be even more powerful and engaging than effective advertising, but neglected social channels look bad and can damage brand reputation. That’s why, ultimately, there’s no such thing as free media.

The watch-out is that for business-to-business brands, too much social media activity can undermine business development. A b2b brand that demands client attention better make that time well-spent, and not just serve its own interests. Too much self-promotion can be a turn-off, either because the company comes across as overly confident and self-important – and perhaps not interested in listening to clients – or because it appears desperate for sales. Neither of those is likely to have been the intended message. As George Bernard Shaw said, the greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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Marketers seem to forget that most people think more about whether to pay for one hour or two in the car park, where there’s 50p at stake, than on the purpose or identity of the many brands they pick up in the weekly supermarket sweep. On the contrary, the role of brands is to simplify decision-making, reduce deliberation, and save time. Remove a familiar indicator at your peril. I recall a coffee brand which changed its pack design from an undistinguished one to a rich, story-telling one which was totally aligned with the brand values and purpose. Sales collapsed. The people who used to buy it couldn’t see the familiar pack on the shelf. To other people, it was just one more unknown brand among many.

So is changing a name worth the risk? It’s an endearing human trait that we tend to overestimate the upside of change, and underestimate the risks. Will Heinz Salad Cream reassert its dominance in the condiments aisle now that people are prompted by the name to deploy it on bread? Maybe. Or do Heinz, as comedian David Mitchell says, “stand on the brink of an epic cock-up: customers looking for Salad Cream suddenly won’t be able to find it and there is currently no one in the world, wandering around any supermarket anywhere, looking for a substance called Sandwich Cream. ‘Disappointed with your current sandwich-moistening agent? Why not try something you’ve never heard of from Heinz?'”

In the business to business world, changing logos or visual identity doesn’t matter too much, and can be a useful signifier of desired change for people inside the business. Short-term pain can lead to longer-term gain, if it’s part of a programme of change. Names, on the other hand, do matter. Not because they explain the business, but because it’s the familiar handle by which we know who we’re dealing with. Which is the definition of a name, is it not? It’s that simple. I was sorry to hear that the quirky independent market research agency Brainjuicer, which had a reputation for original thinking, delivering insight with energy and playfulness – and didn’t their name suit them – has changed its name. It’s now known as System something, presumably to reflect its intellectual underpinning, which is about System one and System two thinking in the human brain, as explained in Daniel Kahneman’s hit book, Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s odd that a business based on emotional, intuitive decision-making (system one) has made this change in pursuit of something rational. That it’s about them, rather than about what they do for clients, only makes it worse.

Marketing is darn simple if you start with the customer, think what matters to them, create value for them, and make it easy for them to obtain. Changing names, identities and pack designs throw obstacles in their way. The potential long-term gain better be worth the short-term risk of getting lost or forgotten. Changing the handle may seem quick and easy but it’s the substance that matters, so make sure the product or service offering is right before you worry about what it’s called.

A final thought. Fetishising names, believing they can signify the entire proposition, can leave people with egg on their faces, as illustrated here. A related blog post about job titles is here.

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Here’s what happened. A package came for me, hand-delivered to the office. It was a silver cardboard box with a lid, like a smart over-sized shoe box, containing the makings of a relaxing weekend breakfast: good coffee, fine rolls, fancy jam, special scissors for trimming bacon so it goes curly and crispy. There was a little note explaining this, but nothing to say who’d sent it, or why. A week later, another silver box arrived, seemingly covering a horse-riding trip and the relaxing bath that would be required afterwards. The contents were quirky and fun to discover. I recall that there was a special comb for the horse’s tail, a couple of carrots and horsey snacks, and for me (obviously) relaxing peppermint tea and bath salts. Another week, another silver box, covering the evening: an eclectic and thoughtful range of treats to eat and drink. By this time, half the office were guessing with me as to who it was from, what it all meant, when the next one would come, and what it would contain.

Finally, a fourth silver box arrived. To our collective and great disappointment, this one was empty, except for a brief note and a business card. The note referred me to my “perfect day” as I had recently described it in a media piece. The contents of each box were designed to complement and enhance my perfect day. It all made sense. The business card? The CEO of a well-known creative communications agency in London, who said they’d be in touch very shortly to make an appointment for us to meet.

I wasn’t in the market for a change of agency, but they’d really earned a meeting. I was open to it.

Then… nothing. No one called.

It’s probably just as well that I really can’t now recall who the agency was. Did they fire their new business person mid-campaign? Or was this the work of an external new business outfit, acting on the agency’s behalf? Perhaps the CEO named on the business card didn’t even know it had been sent. What a waste. All that careful thought, creativity, and activity, which worked like a charm in our office, and not only on me. All for nothing, because they didn’t do the simple follow-through, and get in touch.

Sure, if I’d been teeing up a pitch, I’d have called them. But most marketing communications activity can’t rely on timing so perfect that the customer does the work. There’s all this talk of customer journeys, making it seamless, valuing the customer’s time. Sometimes it’s hard. Big organisations usually have to work round legacy systems standing between them and a simple engagement with a customer. Not so in this case. Just old-fashioned humanity at work. How hard is a phone call?

It reminds me that good execution always trumps great strategy. We like to think we don’t have to choose. Then we pay a lot of attention to the strategy.

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We marketers know we are selling all the time, to clients, colleagues, bosses, as well as to customers. But it’s nice to be reminded how good sales conversations create value for all concerned, and how fulfilling that can be.

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I once worked with a contact centre business in the US mid-west which had the happiest employees in the state, and probably in the entire contact centre industry in the USA. Why? Because they had full employee benefits: specifically, comprehensive healthcare. This business found recruitment and employee retention easy, of course, and it won large contracts from telephony and cable companies across the US. Its staff, the agents, were trained in representing whichever client company they were assigned to, and took calls to handle customer inquiries, sell packages, and “save” customers who were trying to terminate their cable or telephony service. The leaders of the call centre group took pride in investing in their people, because in outsourced customer contact centres, the quality of your agents and their ability to learn new tasks is critical. To grow, the business has to win new contracts, and train existing or new agents in new assignments, with new scripts, pricing packages and the rest, so they can represent the new clients and handle calls from their customers. The agents did a great job, delivering a good experience to the callers and the client company alike, and clients were very satisfied with the call centre agents’ performance. Of course, satisfied clients wanted to give more contracts to their best-performing supplier.

But winning call handling contracts is a competitive business; new competitors were setting up shop, increasing the options available for clients awarding contracts. As a result, pricing was cut-throat – as supply in the sector grew, contracts were being won or renewed at lower rates. But even when the rate per call was forced down, this business’s happy employees did not see a cut in pay or benefits. They did a great job, and everyone was happy – except the shareholders. The business lost money faster and faster as it won new contracts, with the longest serving employees setting the benchmark for pay and conditions. Newer contracts were less profitable, and every time an old contract was renegotiated, the shareholders bore the pain, not the employees. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But the fixation on looking after the agents and keeping them motivated, in order to deliver great customer service, had become a non-negotiable inside that business. Only with new leadership, and significant challenge from new shareholders, did anything change.

The fallacy of the service profit chain is that a single-minded focus on employees will deliver results, when in fact employee satisfaction is necessary but not sufficient. Of course it’s important to have motivated employees, but a total fixation on any one stakeholder group in a business will fail the others. Even the much lauded John Lewis Partnership, whose purpose is “the happiness of all our members, through their worthwhile, satisfying employment in a successful business” recognises that employee happiness at the expense of business success is not sustainable. The JLP purpose is very unusual in being so focused on employees; more commonly, a good purpose expresses why an organisation exists, what it’s there to do ? generally, something its customers will find useful. Google’s for example, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

It’s important to simplify and focus inside a business, and maybe that’s why the service profit chain idea is so appealing. Resist its siren call and instead ensure the enterprise has a clear purpose. It’s harder to get to, but provides a more powerful and lasting focus. A purpose which articulates how the whole enterprise creates value in the world does two vital things.

First, it ensures everyone knows why they’re there. It’s not just to do whatever it is they are currently keeping busy with, nor to keep employees sweet, nor even to make shareholders happy – these things are an outcome of serving a useful purpose for customers. This is essential to the current and future value that the organisation creates. A clear purpose is a spur for continuous improvement, modest tweaks and radical innovation, because it’s a constant reminder that everything the enterprise does is ultimately for a reason which comes from customers; keeping purpose in mind keeps an enterprise connected it with the outside world. This, more than anything, maintains shareholder value.

Second, it gives people meaningful work, which has been shown to be probably the most important single factor in creating employee satisfaction. Which has to be good, because, as we all know, satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers.

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Professor Hamel used it as an example of poor innovation – and of course he’s right, it is rubbish for the end user, the hotels’ customers, you and me. But it is ubiquitous, so there must be lots of people who think it’s a great solution. That got me thinking, a solution for whom? The customer who paid for it, of course, the hotelier. If the brief from the hotelier was, “Help us to save money, by stemming the loss of coat hangers”, then it’s a perfect response. Viewed narrowly, it’s great innovation! No one’s going to steal one of these. (Good job they didn’t take the same approach to the loss of hotel towels – one end would be tethered to a hook on the bathroom wall.) But in solving the direct customer’s problem, the designer created a problem for the customer’s customer, and that can’t be good.

So here’s a challenge: a great response to the business need, as articulated by the client, creates a bigger problem for the client that they may not even be aware of. Did anyone think to check why hangers were disappearing, and try to solve the problem another way? I can think of a couple of alternatives that might cost less and make customers happy. The Malmaison Hotels Group do this nicely with toiletries – they give generous-sized bottles which are labelled “Take me home”. You feel like you’re getting some extra value, even as you pay their super-premium room rates. Or how about an approach informed by behavioural economics? A friendly sign saying, “If you like our chunky hangers, you can buy them and take them home – just check the box on the minibar list”. That’s how hotels deter people from taking bathrobes, so why not use it here too. Maybe people would be happy to have a fiver added to their bill to make it ok to take them. It would certainly make me think twice about popping them into my case and hoping no one notices.

OK, so we don’t choose our hotel based on what sort of hangers they have, but if this is indicative of the general approach they take to improving their business, then there will be a cumulative impact on customers, not to mention the penny-pinching attitude that employees will feel and will express to customers.

The goal in business-to-business marketing must be to help the direct customer do what they do better. Innovation should be to enhance the experience of their customers, and/or their employees, so as to improve their own business performance in the long term. The best innovation saves money and enhances the experience – online order tracking, for example – but so-called innovation that focuses solely on cost reduction is risky (unless the savings are to be shared with the customer). Short term gain can be had, but it will usually at the expense of the very people that business is relying on, their own customers. Marketers can make the difference here, by thinking about how cost-saving initiatives will impact customers and employees.

Why wait to respond to cost cutting measures, though? We can be proactive: thinking through the customer journey – both the purchase journey and the usage experience – is a great way to pre-empt these cost-led initiatives which are value-reducing as well as cost-reducing. Instead you can create a true win-win in which costs are reduced, time saved, and value increased for the customer.

I’ve written, and you’ve read, a whole piece about this stupid coat hanger. Particularly in luxury categories, details matter. They help me, the customer, rationalise my expenditure. This one tiny detail – like Malmaison’s “Take me home” toiletries – can make a big difference to how customers feel. Our job as marketers is to create value for customers and thus revenue for our business. The coat hanger indicates a value extraction mind-set at work – how can the hotel spend less on its fittings while charging guests the same rate – rather than a value creation mind-set. A great marketer would see the opportunity inherent in the disappearing coat hangers: customers want them. So let them have what they want, and make it nice for them, at a price we can all feel good about, so they feel good about you. And the rest of us can have proper coat hangers in our hotel rooms.

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