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B2B marketing fundamentals upended: Bain-B2B Institute study consigns traditional lead gen, KPIs, metrics to bin as ‘hidden buyers’ missed, trillions lost

B2B buyers across 515 brands – including Tesla, PepsiCo, Delta, Pfizer, Hyatt and Comcast – add heft to a growing body of evidence that B2B marketing is literally missing half of decision-makers and losing trillions of dollars in deals annually as a result. The Bain-backed study, by LinkedIn-funded think tank The B2B Institute, suggests “hidden buyers” influence half of the buying process and have very different requirements from target buyers. They don’t care about features, it’s all about downside risk management, AKA backside covering. It means lead generation, measurement, KPIs and fundamentally, brand-performance strategies are all wrong. Those that flip the model and think of B2B marketing as “buyer group marketing” and brand as “deal risk insurance” will unlock massive upside, fast, say B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz and EMEA and LatAm lead, Mimi Turner. Schwarz is staking his reputation on it.

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Retail media eats Google search dollars, display tails off, broadcasters moving towards ad model tipping point, next year’s growth biggest to 2028 – PwC

There’s some light at the end of a brutal tunnel for parts of Australian media, according to PwC’s Australian Entertainment and Media Outlook report, released this morning. Retail media – particularly Coles and Woolworths – will take a bigger chunk of search revenues. Consumers will keep spending billions of dollars on content, though much will be soaked up by telcos. Broadcasters are managing the transition to streaming better than newsmedia went digital – but are currently in the transition danger zone. Digital out of home is on a tear although the network growth which has underpinned revenue growth may have reached equilibrium according to capex spend analysis by the consultancy. Gaming is finally benefiting from the immutable law of advertising – money follows the eyeballs, whether that’s all those eyeballs down in the basement playing League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Halo, or on the train to work playing Monopoly Go, Roblox or Candy Crush. Either way, next year looks likely to be the best revenue wise from here to 2028.

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‘Keep Moving’: REA Group brushes off Domain claims, doubles down on category leadership in big brand push with scale, product and CX key battlegrounds

REA Group has made the Paris Olympics the launchpad for realestate.com.au’s big new campaign, ‘Keep Moving’. General managing of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, is hoping to open up its market share lead ahead of the crucial spring selling season. It’s a play for scale both in messaging and in strategy – the next six months will see executions rollout across TV, BVOD, YouTube, OOH, cinema, radio, digital display, digital audio and social, with a suite of iterations to tackle both brand and product across both buyer-seller and rental segments. It’s a big push, but Myers maintains that REA isn’t worried about it’s biggest rival’s claims of playing catch up. “Our audience position and our brand position has actually never been stronger” she claims. 

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B2B marketing fundamentals challenged: Bain-B2B Institute study consigns traditional lead gen, KPIs, metrics to bin as ‘hidden buyers’ missed, trillions lost

$18 trillion’s worth of B2B transactions take place annually. But “40-60 per cent of deals get stalled”, says B2B Institute founder Jann Martin Schwarz, because B2B marketers are focusing on the wrong things and the wrong people. They are missing the “hidden buyers” that don’t show up in individual-focused lead gen and those buyers – procurement, finance, legals, IT security, the c-suite – don’t care about features. They just care about managing risk. They make group decisions (earlier than B2B marketers realise) based on compromise and the “least worst” option. On average, they represent half of decision-making heft, and they get to veto who gets the contract. That’s one of the key insights from a major global study conducted with Bain across 500-plus enterprise B2B buyers.Across the study, “at every stage, familiarity and trust in a brand or vendor’s reputation was the casting vote,” says B2B Institute EMEA and LatAm lead Mimi Turner. Which means brand influences hidden buyers disproportionately, because it’s effectively “deal risk insurance”, per Schwarz.The study effectively quantifies why nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and underlines why B2B’s brand and performance teams need to align much more closely to hone brand messaging to hit hidden buyers – and stop focusing on leads and individuals. They argue the findings all but obliterate the model on which B2B marketing is founded – and requires a wholesale rethink of lead gen, measurement and strategy.Changing models means graft and pain, especially for the “rank and file KPI’d on reductionist metrics” acknowledges Schwarz. But if adopted, even moving the needle by 1 per cent will unlock $180bn of annual B2B deal-making upside – and early movers will get the biggest hit. Schwarz is willing to “stake my reputation” on brands that flip their models to reach hidden buyers will see “an immediate spike in activity” and “close deals faster”. A prospect, he says, no CEO or CFO will ever decline.

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ACCC highlights key themes for final Digital Platform Services Inquiry report

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has highlighted legislative and regulatory developments, key trends, and potential and emerging competition and consumer issues as the key focus areas of the tenth and final report of the Digital Platform Services Inquiry, due in March 2025.

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