It’s well known that B2B businesses often shift corporate brand communication resources to feed marketing/advertising efforts. As business goals broaden, however, B2B communicators pay closer attention to their corporate brand-building strategies to encourage external audiences toward multifaceted interactions: investing in stock; choosing the company as a preferred employer; championing an issue; and buying products and services. Often this means scrambling to pull together disparate content, including logos, Web sites, newsletters and collateral.
Much like an art curator who carefully acquires, edits and displays a collection of objects with the intention of sparking emotion among those who contemplate it, savvy B2B communications pros are more thoughtfully connecting these assets into a singular brand experience for stakeholders. To learn more, we sought insights from a select group of communications veterans.
CAROLINE JAPIC
Vice President, Corporate Communications, Taleo
At Taleo, we go out of our way to approach marketing as brand curators versus traditional tech marketing product pushers. We have an outside-in perspective and always put the customer or prospect at the center of all we do. We believe it is our responsibility to be the conduit that aligns, creates and executes consistent and engaging messaging regardless of outlet. That’s why the starting point of any marketing initiative at Taleo is always the message. Rather than relying on siloed marketing programs that are a collection of activities and messages, we’ve developed a sophisticated, disciplined messaging process that extends all the way through to execution. This way we support our corporate goals with messaging targeted to specific stakeholders.
Our new “Talent Intelligence Knows” messaging echoes the unique benefit, the brand promise, that Taleo delivers. Talent Intelligence is the insight companies need to capitalize on their most critical asset—their people—and is the consistent ribbon that flows through all of our marketing efforts, from public relations, analyst relations, investor relations, social media, Web, branding, advertising, events, sales communications, internal communications, etc.
We’re seeing excellent response to this integrated program approach, including a dramatic response from prospects to our new branding campaign, heightened media interest and an increase in press coverage, more interactions on the social media front, more hits on our Web site and more employees engaging via chatter. As a result, we are seeing Taleo’s momentum and visibility grow —and that benefits both the brand and the solutions we sell.
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JANICE MAIMAN
Senior Vice President, Communications & Media Channels, AICPA
As the professional home to nearly 380,000 CPAs and accounting professionals, the AICPA serves and advocates on behalf of a broad membership with diverse areas of specialization and interests. The acceleration of the ever-changing, need-to-know demands of the profession has made it imperative to focus and make every communications touch point count.
Just two years ago, the AICPA supported more than 100 competing sub-brands and logo marks. Research revealed confusion and dilution—both inside and outside the organization—which led us to undertake an extensive brand transformation that resulted in a vibrant, new master brand identity system. This was a key milestone in our efforts to connect more deeply and clearly with our stakeholders. From AICPA.org, social media and collateral to trade show graphics, videos and print ads, how we present ourselves is aligned and consistent.
But that’s only part of the story. As brand curators, much of our success can be attributed to how we communicate—tight message alignment, integrated approaches, planning and coordination, and timely content delivery through an expanding network of offline and online channels.
KEVIN J. RAMUNDO
Vice President, Raytheon Network Centric Systems
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JEFF LUCAS
Vice President, Global Communications & Branding, Raytheon
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| Kevin J. Ramundo |
A core message in Raytheon’s brand promise is that we deliver innovative technology in all domains—air, land, sea, space and cyber—to help our customers achieve success. It’s a compelling message for our internal and external audiences, and it’s enthusiastically embraced by the communications teams in Raytheon’s six businesses and the corporate office, which work together as one enterprise team to support company goals and strategic priorities. Whether it’s part of enterprise-wide campaigns like those we execute at the Paris and Farnborough Air Shows [Ed. Note: Read the full case study in the 10/17/11 issue of PR News] or advertising, public relations or social media campaigns executed by Raytheon Network Centric Systems or any of our other five businesses, the message is front and center.
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| Jeff Lucas |
One of the ways we achieve this consistency is through the use of integrated planning teams, which pull together communicators from across the company in specific disciplines—e.g., marketing communications, organizational communications, PR and community relations—to coordinate campaigns in “surround sound.”
A critical tool for us is RSpace, which is an internal social-media platform that enables us to post blogs and wikis and participate in discussion forums in an internally secure, yet transparent environment. And finally, our communications leadership team regularly reviews all major communications plans and this, too, contributes to messaging consistency and powerful and efficient campaigns.
KRISTA SOHM
Vice President, Communications, Meritor
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Over the past few years, Meritor has undergone a business transformation that involved divesting several business units. And in March 2011, the company’s name changed. These events created the challenge of building the corporate brand.
Our approach to this challenge is to apply the concept of “integrated communications”—the coordination of all communication tools, functions and sources into a seamless program that maximizes the impact at a minimal cost.
Every potential “brand builder” is reviewed by the team. Whether we are launching a new product or a community relations campaign, we may issue a news release; highlight the activity in our earnings report and investor presentations (maybe Analyst Day); place photography and information on Meritor.com; write a story for Bull’s Eye (Meritor’s global newsletter); post a photo on Imagine (our internal Web site) and mention the product or campaign during visits on Capitol Hill as it interests legislators.
We follow this process for every newsworthy event that occurs globally—because opportunities to build the corporate brand occur every day. PRN
Contact:
B2B Communications is written and compiled by Mary C. Buhay, VP of marketing and business development at Gibbs & Soell Public Relations. She can be reached at [email protected].