Are big ideas the key to must-see B2B brand campaigns?
For big B2B brand impact, you need a big B2B idea
It’s obviously the aim of every marketing campaign to cut through and communicate your messaging with pinpoint accuracy, but it’s essential when it comes to B2B campaigns in 2024. Business-to-business audiences are increasingly time poor and difficult to engage, so it’s vital that every communication you send them makes an impact.
In our increasingly formulaic AI-mad, funnel-focused, data driven world it can feel like the power of the ‘big idea’ is under question. But the effectiveness of big ideas is clearer than ever, as they can really help brands stand out from the Chat-GPT and machine-built mundanity that’s fast becoming more obvious in the B2B marketing world.
Creative ideas fueled by human inspiration, gut reactions, tenuous links and emotional power (and clever strategy of course) are more capable of eliciting awe, wonder and action than any Excel spreadsheet or AI prompt.
Big ideas can be hard to define and therefore tricky to fit into a performance measurement framework, but their ability to turn heads and change the way B2B decision-makers perceive and remember brands come purchase time cannot be overstated or overlooked.
One way to turn heads and stand out from the bland in an increasingly crowded digital space is by using striking imagery that creates a sense of the unexpected. Take a recent lead generation campaign that we created for our client CHEP (the world’s leading pallet provider), where we were asked to develop a multi-territory creative concept to promote their innovate Q+ display pallet.
The Q+ is a brilliant little quarter pallet that really punches above its weight, helping retailers and brands to sell more with less cost, complexity, and waste. The C-suite audience that we needed to engage are notoriously busy, so the campaign had to work extra hard to quickly cut through and get people to pay attention.
Our big idea was simple: “Quarter pallet. 100% impact.” It’s got a clear simple sell, a flexible structure to adapt across channels and, crucially, it’s instantly gettable. This laid the foundations for an eye-catching treatment that delivered real visual impact. We brought the pallet to life by surrounding it with a fantastic set of static and moving illustrations that emanated from the Q+ display unit (each one representing a particular product benefit or retail category).
It was this eye-catching eruption of objects and colours that not only helped the campaign cut through with energy and impact in market, but also made it work seamlessly across multiple European regions and languages due to its visual simplicity and clear proposition. By incorporating rich, animated elements into the concept, we heightened the visual impact and made the final campaign much more memorable as a result.
Creating bespoke illustrations or photography specifically for your B2B campaign can really help you stand out in a sea of conventional stock photography and AI generated images. It’s important to break away from library and clichéd imagery and use the power of visual storytelling to really capture an audience’s imagination.
We took a similar visually surprising approach for our recent Fi Europe campaign for global events and digital services business Informa. Our lead generation activity for the world’s largest food ingredients event had a clear goal: to grab attention to compel experts from across the global food and drinks industry to attend this unmissable event.
We created a suite of playful and slightly surreal visuals that invited delegates to ‘step into a world of ingredients’. This concept came from the idea that all sorts of expertise, science, technology, innovation, suppliers and equipment goes into making successful food and beverage products.
These are the real ‘ingredients’ that make up great food and beverage products. And short of actually stepping inside a chocolate bar or diving into a soft drink, Fi Europe is the closest you can get to seeing what makes the best food and drink products in the world come to life thanks to ingredients.
The campaign’s deliberately unusual images were designed to be supersize and eye-catching and, as a result, delivered real cut-through and impressive engagement results.
With a year-on-year increase in click-throughs and a 38.5% increase in overall engagement the concept undoubtedly drew audiences in. Ultimately helping Fi Europe to achieve their highest attendance levels ever – 23,149 visitors and 1,407 exhibiting brands
Looking at some other successful examples of cut through creative, beyond what we’re doing at Upp b2b, we’d cite the 2023 campaign for Workday in the US. They provide cloud-based software for financial management, pretty dry stuff, but the big idea they pushed out last year, was anything but.
Their brilliant multi-million-pound TV spot centred around a phrase that’s overused as a compliment in companies: “You’re such a rock star” and featured some legendary musicians like Ozzy Osborne, Joan Jett and Billy Idol, who all asked the corporate world to stop using the term.
This was followed with an official apology to the rock star community, in the form of a full-page print ad in the Wall Street Journal. Massive budget and celebrity endorsements aside, this campaign is still based on that core principle of delivering a clear big idea with real visual punch.
Workday’s aim was to disrupt the B2B conversation and expand awareness of their product, from the C-suite to the broader company employees – and it did just that!
The positive sentiment and buzz the creative idea generated for the brand was incredible. The campaign smashed all its KPIs and outperformed anything they’d ever done before which, you could say, is par for the course, when you use hard rock to sell your product! Plus, more importantly Workday’s brand equity was boosted into the B2B stratosphere!
Often the reason B2B creative work ends up feeling ‘safe’ and ‘samey’ is a desire to avoid taking any risks. But it’s important that both client and agency, see the bigger picture and remain open-minded when they’re collaborating on projects, whilst also being willing to step outside of the comfort zone.
In competitive markets, playing it safe is often the biggest risk you can take, as your campaign is much more likely to be missed, ignored and forgotten if it’s not strong enough to stand out. And we hate to see disappointed faces when campaigns fail to light anyone’s fire due to the dilution effect of a great creative idea as multiple business stakeholders add their own creative input.
This recent video ad (July 2024) by Amazon Business has this vibe – that maybe too many hands were on deck with an opinion. It’s obvious that this B2B ad was allocated a decent ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ inspired production budget, but we can’t help but feel that it doesn’t quite land as effectively as it could have. The script could have worked much harder to build some personality and to reinforce the ‘drowning in paperwork’ proposition. Let us know what you think!
To achieve truly great output from big creative ideas, the creativity needs to flow in both directions, between agency and client – and it takes a fair amount of bravery to develop something distinctive that is going to build your brand rather than just promote it. But the rewards are well worth it, and well within your grasp.
Partnering with an agency you can trust is key to moving out of your comfort zone and embracing new ideas and new ways of thinking that can deliver brand impression and boost recall.
Having a clear and single-minded proposition is also vital. If you want your message to stand out, everyone needs to know exactly what you’re trying to say.
As always, understanding your audience is a critical part of the process. You need to know what interests them, what bores them and what will surprise them (in a good way). This means analysing trends in the market, doing customer-research where possible and using this information to directly inform creative briefs.
As a final thought, in a world of scrutinised marketing spend and campaign analytics, the need to look beyond marketing formulas to capture the attention of B2B decision-makers with distinctive big ideas is something that must never be lost in the intensifying melee for metrics.
If you’d like to make sure your next campaign stands out, get in touch with the team at Upp B2B now: hello@uppb2b.co.uk
