Rachel Fairley, co-founder and co-author, Rebrand Right.
AI and automation are transforming B2B marketing, but in a world of machine-generated content one question remains: how do brands stay truly authentic? Rachel Fairley is an expert in fixing brands to drive growth. At Advertising Week Europe, Chris Cannon of TechFinitive asked Rachel for her advice.
If you want your brand to be authentic, then you have to define what is authentic about your brand.
Authenticity is felt when a brand executes its brand strategy cohesively. Strong brands improve business performance because they can attract more buyers, stretch into new sources of revenue and support price increases, and improve employee engagement, decision-making and cohesive working. What leading brands have in common is that they are Cohesive, Relevant, Easy and Different – CRED – the four brand factors that drive growth.
To strengthen your brand’s CRED you have to begin by diagnosing the strength of your brand and understanding what needs to be protected, changed or added, to answer the four exam questions at the heart of every brand strategy: 1) why it exists, 2) what it does, 3) who you are and how you do things, and 4) how you look, feel and sound. This must drive the decision-making and behaviour of the people that work for it, so that you are authentic together.
Just because you can make tons of content, it doesn’t mean you should.
A brand doesn’t feel authentic when it isn’t cohesive. Too often the tactics a buyer experiences can feel like random acts of marketing. Each individual tactic can be justified internally but doesn’t do the job or work together with the others. This prevents you from building and reinforcing those relevant and different associations in buyer’s mind that predispose them to feel your brand is the right choice.
Easy as it may be, beware of making derivative, beige content based on the average of what has gone before. Your buyers will strain to hear what matters in the cacophony. Many CMOs tell me they are upping their investments in creative to cut through the copious amounts of AI-authored content their colleagues are churning out. They know that high quality creative attracts four times more profit than low quality.
Some say that we live in a post-truth age. Edelman tells us trust in institutions is down. Be careful of the signal you send. For many B2B brands the expertise within the business is critical for developing products and delivering services. Do you think buyers don’t value your colleagues expertise enough to make it central to your marketing? Fellow panellist Izzie Rivers, CEO of media agency Realm B2B, can see in the data that content is 5 to 6 times more effective when it features a respected internal stakeholder. Use cases continue to outperform standard messaging and that gap is only widening. Authenticity cuts through.
It is amazing what tech can do, but it is a tool. If you want to grow your business, address the buyers’ category entry points – the reasons they come shopping – and the benefits they seek. Be relevant to what the buyer wants to know at each stage in their journey. Be cohesive in everything else they have experienced of your brand, because this gives them confidence in your brand. Be easy to mind, easy to buy, easy to use and easy to engage with. Be different enough to stand out, don’t be bland!
Don’t be afraid of emotion
Authenticity is about being real and as humans our realness is rooted in our emotions. B2B marketing is regularly accused of lacking emotion. When you play it ‘logical’, you may feel you are playing it safe but you can be wasting effort. You need creative that cuts through the noise and generates an emotional response to help you get attention and become easy to mind when the buyer is buying. We know that AI can create an emotional response but that won’t help if it is not the desired emotional response.
Generating an emotional response from creative executions really helps. We know this thanks to people like Iain McGilchrist and Orlando Wood. There are five different types of attention and the right hemisphere of the brain is occupied with four of them. It’s vigilant, alerting us to new experiences and it prioritizes what the left side of our brain, which is all about focused attention and what you should concentrate on. As McGilchrist shares, “In almost every case, what is new must first be presented in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left… it alone can bring us something other than what we already know.”
So, what gets the attention of our right hemisphere? Orlando Wood explains that getting the attention of the right requires tapping into a more emotional strategy. Emotion helps to embed associations in our minds and helps predisposition. The emotional response that’s appropriate for your brand is defined in your brand strategy. Sage build confidence, Cadbury focus on the spirit of generosity, Amex on reassurance.
Being easy to pay attention to also means you can’t be boring. It sounds obvious. But around 50% of all ads generate no emotional response whatsoever. The reaction is neutrality.
The last thing a brand needs is to make no impact at all on the buyer.
The convergence of tech and brands 