There Are No LinkedIn Miracle Cures… Sorry!

Q. Give us a quick snippet of who you are and your origins. What was your spider-bite moment into becoming an absolute bloody branding legend?

Marc: I'm a brand consultant who helps successful entrepreneurs build brands investors love. I got my start as a writer and creative director working at multinational ad agencies in Asia, Europe and North America; then I launched / sold an ad agency committed to making sustainability sexy and to work helping entrepreneurs.

My spider bite moment? I grew up in Calgary, an oil town. I was an english major in a place where you work in oil, or you, well, leave. I left, and went to Switzerland to work with Longines, the watch company. There, I discovered people that take pictures, put headlines under them, and call them ads. I couldn't believe people actually made money doing that. I never looked back.

Q. As a Brand Strategist, is there anything you urge B2B brands to do with their marketing?

B2B brands are cursed by the self-perception that they sell to rational, business-minded buyers. There is no such thing as a rational buyer - just emotional buyers who then justify their purchase with facts and logic. B2B brands need to understand that sustainable growth comes when you create an emotional bond with your customers. So what do I urge B2B founders to do? Before you even think about marketing, understand the deep down, emotional, irrational, driving forces pushing your prospects toward / away from you.

Q. What's something B2B firms are doing with their branding that they need to stop doing? Are they missing the mark in certain aspects?

B2B brand stewards, like most brand stewards today, are cursed by a firehose of impossibly attractive marketing possibilities. Our natural instinct is to jump from one tactic to another like a squirrel on espresso, becoming more and more frustrated, spending more and more money, diluting the brand at every step. Stop watching the snake oil salesmen pushing AI / SEO / Web 3.0 / TikTok / NFT / etc miracle cures on Linkedin. None of these solutions are bad in and of themselves. But they're TACTICS, and pointless (or worse) if you aimlessly implement them without understanding the foundational pillars of your brand (Value Prop,  Mission / Vision / Values, Brand Promise, Positioning vs competition, to name a few), and figuring out a fundamental strategy for growing your business for the next year or two.

To read the full interview, head on over to the SaaS Marketer website where you’ll find some incredible insights from Marc on the state of B2B Marketing; his thoughts on the recent WARC report; and how AI is impacting the world of B2B Marketing (and is it a good thing?)!

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Sorry… that was really patronising…

See you next week!

Keep growing,
SaaS Marketer

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