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A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Almost a year ago today, I took on the challenge to launch an industry-level B2B brand. We had 90 days, multiple brand partners, and a dream. In today’s article in keeping with our brand and positioning theme this week, I’ll share 3 key lessons I learned along the way.
What are your thoughts on what ways to create and develop a new B2B Brand? Share your thoughts on the Buzz Community.
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3 Lessons from Launching an Industry-Level B2B Brand
Launching a B2B brand in today’s complex market is difficult. Launching a a B2B brand with 10 partners is even crazier. A summer ago, we took on that challenge and I wanted to share 3 key lessons we learned from that experience.
Lesson #1: Orchestration is Paramount
As many of us know, brining a B2B brand is tremendous work by a village of marketing contributors. But a key to do it successfully is orchestration. In our case, we were working with 10 B2B companies to bring our B2B brand to market. Not only did we need to orchestrate the brand’s direct go to market, but also our go to market through our 10 partner companies.
This was a challenge. Even more so in the complex world of today’s B2B go to market that’s digital-first and always on. The secret to successful multi-company brand launches is orchestration. And to deliver great orchestration is to deliver marketing-as-a-service as your enablement strategy. In our case, deliverables were created and shared in a way that all 10 companies’ own marketing teams could activate their corollary go to markets with the tools that we provided across (social, PR, advertising, email, etc.).
Lesson #2: Speed to Market is Key
Even though we were working with a slew of larger B2B brands technology brands, including some publicly traded companies, we need to ensure speed to market. We wanted to capture the wave of industry activity around our topic. This meant we needed to instill as sense of urgency in both large and small companies to drive our initiative forward.
While regular rhythm of business meetings helped to us to get group decisions done, the other key aspect of these bi-weekly touch bases was to share a sense of urgency among the group of participants. This enabled us to drive speed to market. Consider this, we build an industry brand in 100 days from inception to public launch and not only executed the work but also empowered the group to make key-decisions across multiple companies. Amazing work by the team.
Lesson #3: Momentum is Essential
At Microsoft, we used to call it “rolling thunder”. But the key here is build momentum by cohorts. First the key group, then the next band of players, and so forth, before you bring a B2B Brand to market. This is important as it provides social proof to next group out to drive momentum for your young B2B brand.
Tactically, for this initiative we did it a few ways, have our partner companies activate our messaging, etc. in their own marketing efforts. Engage sales leaders at partner companies to collaborate on audience development. And third, engage partner executive leadership to participate and speak at the events components of our new brand launch. This elevated the visibility of our efforts and solidified our momentum.
The outcome of initiatives was a launch of a new brand, material business value for sponsors in terms of leads generated, etc. and a new brand that has since morphed into an industry trade group. Great outcomes for all the participants. And a shout out and thank you to all those folk that help create the Clean Room Consortium.
What are your thoughts on what ways to create and develop a new B2B Brand? Share your thoughts on The Buzz Community.
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