Marketing 911
Marketing 911, is the podcast where we tackle the toughest marketing challenges at the executive level.
Whether you're navigating complex strategies, trying to reach your target audience, or facing shifting market dynamics, we're here to provide you with actionable solutions.
From digital transformation to customer retention, if it's a marketing crisis, we're here to help you solve it—before it turns into a full-blown emergency.
Marketing 911
Cracking the Brand Code: Bridging Brand and Demand in B2B Marketing
What happens when brand marketing and demand generation collide? Emily Miller, VP of Branding, reveals the powerful synergy that's reshaping B2B marketing strategy. Gone are the days when brand teams operated in ivory towers while demand teams drove business metrics - today's competitive landscape demands their seamless integration.
Miller shares a stunning statistic: 95% of B2B buyers aren't actively purchasing at any given moment. This reality transforms how we should view brand building - not as a luxury, but as essential groundwork that keeps your company relevant until prospects enter buying mode. "If somebody asks you out on a date, you do not marry them on that first date," Miller explains. "Marketing's job is to make all those touches happen so when that customer is ready for a deeper relationship, they know more about you."
The conversation explores the "messy middle" - that challenging space where high-level brand narratives must connect to specific product offerings. Drawing from her experience with major sponsorships like the NFL, Miller illustrates how brand initiatives must ultimately translate to business value that sales teams can articulate. The podcast delves into measuring brand effectiveness beyond immediate metrics, determining when messaging has grown stale, and making strategic decisions about brand refreshes.
Perhaps most fascinating is Miller's insight into using neuroscience for marketing research, revealing how sensors tracking brainwaves during ad exposure showed marketers have mere fractions of a second to capture attention. This scientific approach reinforced a fundamental truth: "At the end of the day, it's still people and that's what you need to connect to - their pain points."
Ready to transform how you think about brand and demand in your marketing strategy? Listen now and discover why these once-separate disciplines have become the essential power couple of modern B2B marketing.
you're listening to marketing 911. I'm your co-host, richard bliss, and today I'm joined by my other co-host brian backstrand.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, richard, and uh I'm excited about today you've actually brought a guest that I know from a previous life yep, I have.
Speaker 1:I've brought uh somebody who, uh, is a lot smarter in some areas than we are, and that is Emily Miller. Emily Miller is a vice president of branding. You've known her for quite some time, as have I. We've certainly been influenced by her work and so great to have her as a guest today.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you very much for welcoming me onto your podcast. Great to be here.
Speaker 2:Excellent, great to have you, emily, good seeing you. So for the audience, just going back, what got you into brand? Did you start out wanting that or were you in other parts of marketing and landed in it?
Speaker 3:You know, started out, I would say, more in like go-to-market campaigns. I was young in the tech industry and ended up coming back. I was young in the tech industry and ended up coming back into the field through an agency, worked for a consulting agency that was focused on branding and I loved the storytelling aspect of companies and really B2B companies and leadership and culture as a part of the brand, versus necessarily like a you know, house of brands product specific, like kitty litter, you know, as Gotcha Gotcha and as a VP, kitty litter, I love that.
Speaker 2:As a VP of brand marketing at a Fortune 500 company, one of my first questions is, because this is kind of going around has brand and demand gen kind of blended in together?
Speaker 3:Great question. It's definitely gotten a lot closer, I would say, over the last 10 years, I think. Before it was seen as, maybe, just like you know, the brand did this. They were kind of in this ivory tower and then demand was where you were driving the business impact and really connecting with sales, and that's a luxury that nobody can afford. So brand has to work really hard and connect really closely into demand and if it doesn't, then it's not working for you.
Speaker 2:And so what are the connection points between brand demand, gen and then taking the leap to sales?
Speaker 3:The story has to start at the top. I would say kind of like you know what is your narrative as a company, kind of why are you doing what you're doing? Who are you going after? What's your differentiation? How do you stack up against the competition? And then what's that? You know what's that vision that customers can buy into for the long haul. But you've got to connect that big picture down into what you sell. And I think a lot of times it's hard, especially for B2B companies, to make that connection from the big idea into the portfolio. So what are the connections between you? Know? It's like what customers are interested in, what keeps them up at night? How do you like provide that garden path to go from big picture into what my imperatives are as a customer, into what we sell? What's it going to do for you? And then you've got to create the tools for sales to then be able to go tell that story. You can't make a great story that nobody's comfortable telling, because then it will fall flat on its face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think when you and I worked together, I was on the field side and you were on the global side, and I think back then it was a lot further apart. Yeah, and it was yeah, it's getting closer, definitely getting closer. But I do remember numerous conversations regarding hey, here's what the field is saying, here's what sales are saying, here's what the partners are saying, and it didn't line up necessarily with the brand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think that's where we had one agency that we worked with that talked about how do you go from the top again the company story into the portfolio. They called it the messy middle because you've got to make those connections through. Like I remember one time when we had I think you would remember this when we had an NFL sponsorship about 10 years ago. You know we had these great messages around. You know we block for your blind side and you know you know security as a team sport. You know great messaging but then you couldn't just drop down into and buy this product. Like you have to have some down into and buy this product. You have to have some steps in between that and if you don't work with sales to figure out what those steps are that are going to work, they're just going to take your stuff. They're not even going to take your stuff, they're not going to download it, they're just not going to use it. And then you've done a lot of work that just sits on a SharePoint.
Speaker 2:I remember when we were doing that, you brought up a memory and I was sitting in the office of the head of sales and we're on a speakerphone and it was being pitched to the head of sales and myself and I remember him putting it on, putting on mute, saying, brian, how many leads are we going to get out of this NFL thing? And so how do you? Over the years, how have you kind of sat in front of sales and connected the dots, because it's not easy.
Speaker 3:It's not easy and I think that is one of the challenges is that when you invest in brand up here, it's not a 13-week cycle. You're not going to get output within 13 weeks. But what you do need to show is how do you engage with an account. For example, say you have a target account list and you're using brand content to touch that account, whether it be through social like LinkedIn, through your advertisements, through you know you're targeting them. There's so many touches that you're going to have that are not going to be like a actual offer, like we used to use the example. You know, if somebody you know you get asked out on a date, you do not marry them on that first date, like you go on multiple dates, and so marketing's job is to make all those touches, all those dates happen so that when that customer is ready to, you know, have a deeper relationship, that they know more about you and they're comfortable, you know, kind of taking it to the next level.
Speaker 2:That's why I think, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I was going to say something here because I remember this experience as well and one of the biggest challenges was this connection between we're going to use the NFL example the NFL and a technology company.
Speaker 1:You know where does he make that? And, emily, I can remember some of our conversations and one of the things we were able to do with that was bring in some of the users of the technology who were affiliated with the NFL's greater story and then tell their stories under that NFL umbrella right, some of the teams that we, that we and then we were able to write about things that were interesting to our customers, nfl fans, and yet then under the brand of the company brand, so that there was an association with oh, they are liking something that I like, and occasionally we were able to drop in a story a case study about how an NFL team was using that. So you're right, it was touch. It was very soft touch points, but there was a chance for us to talk a little bit deeper about a program rather than just kind of throwing out here's a case study about one sport or a random sport here and there where it came kind of cohesive together. So I saw that a little bit.
Speaker 3:You know it's great that you catch attention, using a sponsor, for example. That's one marketing strategy you can employ, like using, you know, using somebody else's logo that you attach to, it's great to get you noticed. But then you know, especially in B2B, like people need to look under the hood. They're not going to just trust you on that. They need to know, like, well, what are you doing for that customer?
Speaker 3:You know are you doing cause if you're just paying money to put your logo next to it, like that's not authentic to an IT buyer and they need to know, like, what exactly are you doing for these different, you know sports entities or properties? So you have to develop the content. You have to, you know, bring speakers to events. You have to show that with evidence so that people then go okay, I get it.
Speaker 3:So when you know I heard a great stat from LinkedIn about 95% of your B2B buying IT market is not in the market at any one given time. It's only 5% that's actually in the purchasing thing. So all that, all those people that 95% need to hear about what you're doing with your customers over and, over and over. It takes seven to 10 times to remember something. So you've got to keep hitting them with interesting things, make them laugh, make them do something that makes them think provocatively about their day, so that when they're in the market to look for something, you're on that short list and you're not having to fight for relevance and just even awareness at that point, because then you're too late.
Speaker 2:That's why I think I do think brand and demand are now one of the same. I really do, because the branding that you're describing that high level message, and then the subtext absolutely should be able to drive somebody to the website.
Speaker 3:It's a yin and a yang at this point, that's right and the thought leadership.
Speaker 2:And you know, in that particular program I remember we had NFL players that we could bring into events and those use case nothing, not nothing, but use cases are critical to marketing. So, yeah, I think it's really come together in the last few years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the Mart and I would say the Martech stack is there now to support it. I think you know, 10 years ago we had to work with IT to show how one account was touched by multiple you know multiple outreaches. But now you can do so much more like a programmatic way to kind of show hey, here's how this account engaged. It's not, you know, some analyst creating a PowerPoint slide, it's. There's so much more that you can see with the you know with the technology we can.
Speaker 3:You know we were calling it like one journey where it's like somebody comes in up here and over many, many months you're going to see them engage and it's that constant engagement that you need to see, and then you're going to start to see the results downstream.
Speaker 2:So one question I always had about brand how do you know when you've got a good message? Like the question of how do you know when you have a good digital campaign? Well, because look at all the people coming to our website. It's very subject. So, as a brand expert, how did you know when you were hitting the right button?
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that spoke most to me, especially in some of the most recent work I've done, is when the analysts have been happy and they have said not so much happy, but they feel like you're hitting something that they're hearing from the customers that are calling them. That was definitely like a kind of a check mark of confidence that we had in the messaging, because we road tested it with analysts, customers, prospects and, if they could see it, they were like I get this, I understand where you're going, and so that gave us some validation. That was helpful. Now, granted, you then need to modulate it for the different part.
Speaker 3:You can't just have the one message. I think that's one thing. Sometimes people are like okay, we got our message, now we're done. No, maybe that's a message for the CIO, but it's not a message for somebody else who's maybe a CISO or somebody who's reading more of a function, like a research function, for example. You've got to then take that message and you need to fine tune it, because I think that's that's the that's that. Next step is how do you create more relevant messaging for people? Because, again, you're hit with so many things every day. If you see something that just looks like blah blah or just too high level or two, or just wrong, you're not, you're not going to respond, you're not going to remember, you're not going to engage.
Speaker 1:I'm going to chime in. I'm going to chime in here because, talking about the measurements, we had one with this program where I was doing a little bit with Emily, but we were doing some other things. In this case, we were working with Forbes and Forbes came back to us and said the content we were putting out on Forbes was some of the highest engagement that they had readership dwell time, people reading it. But then we had a secondary input and that was LinkedIn's corporate came to us and said that our content that we were producing was in the top 5% of the most popular content on the entire LinkedIn platform, telling us that we were reaching. Now, were we reaching buyers? Yeah, In this basket of people who were paying attention to our content, they were buyers.
Speaker 1:But it was an indicator to us that we were tapping into a dialogue that was causing people just to pay attention, share it, talk about it, engage with it. And when a third party like LinkedIn came to us and said no, no, no, we're not just talking about your, we're just talking, we're talking about our entire platform. You guys have risen to the top, that was an indicator to us that, oh, we tapped into something that, hey, let's keep keep this going, Cause we were learning also the feedback from those type of as you're saying with the analysts. You're getting those feedbacks from non-direct input, telling you you're reaching a wider audience than just, necessarily, the direct mail piece that you sent out to that customer. No, you're hearing a spillover effect, and so that was one of the examples that we had from that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean third-party validation is awesome. The challenge is again the timeframe. So when you've got you know sales leaders have you know short, shorter timeframes and expectations. So how do you get that you know? How do you get that validation quickly so that you can keep you know? We had one, I remember I had one boss and the way she described it was like figure out what fires are burning, well, and you pour more gasoline on those fires to just keep those ones going, because, again, we may get bored of it internally, but the market is not going to be bored of your message.
Speaker 3:It's going to take a lot longer for them to hear it. So I think it's definitely getting that validation. I think the challenge, then, is you've then got to translate that into the business impact that your sales leaders recognize, because they that might be interesting to them, but it's not. It's not actually like the impact that they're looking for. So you've got to figure that out, translate that and get that like, convert that into the things that they care about.
Speaker 2:So, just from a tactical standpoint, what is that message that you brought to analysts and customers? Was it a sentence? Was it a tagline? Was it a vision? What was it that you brought to them? They said oh yeah, this is different. What is that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we, what we, you know, we've called it many things in the past. It was a point of view, it was a, you know, whatever this, this was a narrative, and so I think it's gotta be more than's, got to be more than a paragraph, because you've got to be able to substantiate it, you've got to be able to kind of explain it. Thinking about, almost like if this were like a position paper, you know, what is our thesis, who do we need to be and what is it that we are promising in the future? What's that trajectory for growth? What is it that we are promising in the future? What's that trajectory for growth? And then, how are we going to pay it off? And why is this, you know, why is it differentiated? Why is it, you know, relevant to customers and how is it going to serve us in the long term? And so, being able to, you know so, whether it's the form of a PowerPoint or a white paper, you know, just, it's got to be, it's got to be more than just a nice paragraph, and I think that's where, when I started out in branding, I would say it was a bit more of the short, romantic paragraph and it just didn't do enough. It didn't have enough meat in it to really drive forward what needed to be done.
Speaker 3:So you've got to blow it out a little bit and explain, like, what does this mean from, like, a portfolio offering standpoint? How does the portfolio pay off this vision and narrative? What's missing? How are you going to pull more you know capabilities? Are you going to grow them in-house? Are you going to do M&A? How do you then pay off that story? And so, by walking them through the story, getting their feedback, and then you know getting you know suggestions, I'm like, okay, where is the story kind of thin? Like where do you need to shore it up? Where can I poke holes in it? That's what you want them to do. You want them to poke holes so that you can then, you know, stopgap that and make it better. So when you actually do take it out to market, customers aren't doubting those same things.
Speaker 2:And so the idea, if you're in front of a customer is I'm going to show you three paragraphs that has a vision of where we're going, and you want the customer to say that's exactly where I want to go, and none of your competitors are going there. So what I'm seeing here I'm going to buy into. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Does it meet my needs? Does it speak to the things that stress me out as a customer and do I have confidence looking at what you say you're going to be focused on and how you are talking about what you're doing? Does it all hang together? And I think that's a challenge sometimes, for when you do acquisitions, it might make sense, but if you don't have a way to explain it, you know why again, the why, like any. If you can explain the why, then people will understand. If you just say, oh, this is where we're going and it's really cool and flashy, but then they're like yeah, but I don't understand this thing. Why? How does that connect to that? You've got to be able to do more than just kind of paint a pretty picture. You got to be able to do more than just kind of paint a pretty picture. You got to be substantiated.
Speaker 2:And then boiling that down to what's going to be the headline on the homepage.
Speaker 3:Yeah, how does that translate? And then, so, once you're there, then it's like okay, well, what does this mean? Like, how does this translate? How does it manifest into all of these different creative deliverables? So, whether that's, you know, we create a campaign at with a big message about the company, like I kind of saw. You know, I see the brand role is like in a company is to sell the company, but then you've got to explain, well, what are the pieces within that company and what are these different things? What do they do for you? What are the needs? You know, how do they meet your needs? What is your problem? And then how does?
Speaker 3:that you know, then go down into the solutions themselves. But you can't drop too quickly into the solution, so all of that needs to be in that narrative, and then you figure out how you express that in the market.
Speaker 1:And we haven't. I was gonna say we haven't even talked about right now. We've been talking about the narrative, we haven't even talked about branding, where now you take that narrative and extend it to the visual. What does that look, literally look like? What is the imagery, what's the color palette, what's the iconography, all of that? Now Do you change your logo? Yeah, what was that? Sorry, you cut out just for a second.
Speaker 3:No, I was just going to say do you change your logo?
Speaker 1:I'm going to ask a question here, brian. I'm going to ask a question here because Emily has sat in this role, has worked with executives at all levels, and Brian, so have you, as have I. You mentioned getting tired of it before the customer does. One of the biggest challenges I think that we all face is sometimes our salespeople or our own executives get tired of seeing it long before our customers do, and you have to convince them. Now you're upselling that. No, no, no, no. We have to stay the course. You have to give it time. We see a turnover of leadership. Okay, the first thing we're going to do is refresh the logo.
Speaker 1:I've been guilty as a chief marketing officer. Walking in, I still remember that and it was like, yeah, it was a better logo, but did I really need to make that my first priority? Right, and so what are some of the skill sets that you use to help convince and let them be satisfied with something that they feel maybe has grown stale, where you're like no, we haven't even given it a chance to permeate the market? Yeah, we're seeing it every day, but we need to get it to our customers and market. Where do you see that challenge? Is it a challenge. Maybe you're so good at it that you didn't have that problem and I and I was just me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I mean, it is like everybody loves to. You know, you change the logo. It's a very visual sign of change. But again, like I mean, I always like in everything, everything goes back to high school. Like you know, the kid that left eighth grade, you know, wearing like a certain outfit and then they came back fall of ninth grade and they had like a completely different outfit. Well, if nothing inside changed, that kid is the same kid. They just got a you know, completely different identity. But the way that that's always why I've explained branding is like, yes, it is what you look like, but it's what you say and it's how you behave.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like more like my ex-wife when I got ex-wife?
Speaker 3:that's what that sounds like to me, so yeah, not high school it comes back to dating, like I joke that NFL was like the movie can't buy me love with Patrick Dempsey. It was paying the popular girl to sit next to you. That's what you're doing. You're getting that equity and you either pay with money or you give free products or you know whatever. But I'd say the key is like what do you? What is the change that you need to signal? And then how are you going to show that that change is happening?
Speaker 3:And so, yes, changing your logo is one way to do it. It could just be like could just be refreshing things within your identity system. Maybe you keep the logo, but you just refresh the imagery. You get the colors, like again you can reboot without having to throw everything away. Because I do think sometimes there is a sense of like you know companies that do go through that like schizophrenic identity change. You're like who are you? And so there are things that you can keep and carry forward. You're not going to be able to measure, you know, business impact with a logo change, but you are going to be able to drive a change initiative and that's one way to help you do it. And it's visual, so people see it and they get it, but again, you've got to pay it off with a heck of a lot more than just oh, we have a new logo.
Speaker 2:We're running up against it. But I have one more question. So, along that same line, when and who makes the decision? That messaging has become stale? Because I can see those meetings where it's been four, five, six months and somebody in the room an executive, says I was just that so-and-so customer and they said you know, I'm tired of what you guys are saying. When are you going to change, like? How does that decision get made?
Speaker 3:I think it's definitely when there's an external voice that has a lot of weight. So maybe it's your partner community, you know. Maybe your partners are like this is not working, our customers are like this doesn't matter to our customers, or they say I'm not taking this to your customer when customers give that direct feedback. If you have leaders within the organization who meet with customers that just say, look, I tried this and it was like it just didn't work, and then when that's happened, then marketing has to kind of they have to take the feedback.
Speaker 3:I think you need again you cannot be precious about the work, like I once rolled out a whole sales training and everybody was like this is the best one we've ever had. I've never wanted to use, you know, a corporate marketing deck, but I will. Great, the first, you know the this piece, the top part, was okay, the middle piece needed work, and so we got feedback on that and we were like you know what you're right, so we kind of, you know, revised it and got it out again. I think you've got to be able to take the feedback and then you've got to show like you've got to then do some things and take action and then get their feedback on the change, don't just throw it out there you know, get their feedback, get their buy-in, because they've got to be the ones that take it to the street.
Speaker 1:This has been a great conversation, brian. I think we are up against time. We could keep talking. Emily's got. There's a question I've been dying to ask. We're over time. I'm going to ask my question just because I've been dying. Emily, I saw you use neuroscience, with people wearing weird wired head thingies wired to their brains. What prompted that? Because now we're talking about marketing tools, that type of thing. That was a fascinating. It has stayed with me and I think Carmen Simon was the neurologist at the time who did that. That's the research I've done. Tell me just. I had to ask what was that all about? I don't know about it.
Speaker 2:So what's the context?
Speaker 3:So we were working with our research firm who would help us do brand studies and you have your typical online quant brand study.
Speaker 1:You can do qual.
Speaker 3:It's always nice to have your quant and your qual and you can use that to really shape your insights and your findings. But we were coming out with a new campaign and our agency said we're doing this really cool thing where we put these little like, you know, octopus things on people's heads that have sensors attached and we read their brainwaves while they watch your content. And it was super fascinating because I know I mean it was super cool and I would love to, and I the learnings though I have used for the last 10 years, which is great. So we got we were able to show people who were sitting there with those octopus things on their heads. They would look at um banner, like digital um ads that we had created that were going to go online.
Speaker 3:So they were, you know, they had motion, they weren't static and basically they would watch these you know 15 second, maybe 30 second little mini videos and you could track their brain waves and see when did they kind of tune out, when did they pay attention, where were their eyes looking, and it was really helpful because they were like, if you do not catch that person's attention within the first, you know, like half second, like they're done, they're not going to look, and so that changed how we like brought up the company name, cause you're like, if you're not going to watch the whole video, you need to know at least who made this video so you might remember it.
Speaker 3:So it changed the way we like staged things within the video and it made us speed some things up, some things. We were like, oh no, it's really beautiful, and it was like it doesn't matter, like you guys like get to the point, and so that was a great way to use science because again, like you know, marketing it's it's, you know, it's psychology, it's behavior. You're really trying to tap into people as people, and I think that's the. My final comment on that is you know you may be I've been a B2B for a very long time At the end of the day, it's still people and that's what you need to connect to about their issue, like their pain points. Yes, they might be company pain points, but at the end of the day, they're people.
Speaker 1:Great Emily. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
Speaker 3:Yes, I think that's a great way to end, richard, and I'm glad that on my head when I'm in a meeting, because then they might know when I tune out. No, I'm just kidding, right? Yes, I'm glad that hasn't gotten to the workplace.
Speaker 1:No, not yet. Not yet You've been listening to Marketing 911. I'm Richard Bliss, the host, joined by my co-host, Brian Baxter, and our guest today has been Emily Miller, Vice President of Branding, and we've had a fascinating conversation about the go-to-market, the tie between sales and marketing branding and the way to actually get that message out and how to track and measure that. Hopefully, you found something interesting. I know that I have. We appreciate the input we've received from our listeners. Continue to send it to us and until next time, thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
