Your competition is not your competitor – it’s Madison Avenue

I was in Las Vegas last week on a vacation with my wife.

I say that not to brag but just as a point of reference. You see, we were sitting at breakfast minding my own business when I couldn’t help but overhear the three businessmen sitting next to me chattering away. One was an owner or manager (I’m not sure which) for a company that manufactures sunglasses. He was being sold to by two guys representing a plastics coating company.

There they were, sitting at a breakfast table in a restaurant in a resort, talking business – and it dawned on me: “There’s a reason why these guys are sitting here among the palm trees and gourmet coffee talking business rather than back at the office with the Styrofoam cups and generic blend.”

It may seem obvious, but if you want to make a customer feel special, you treat them a certain way. Duh. We’ve all done that, whether it’s a steak dinner or a round of golf at a nice course. But why?

Because most of us have a set of common reference points as to what is nice and what is tacky – set, in large part, by the opinion leaders in the media. Madison Avenue (meaning the ad industry) has helped lead this image-making process for years. And whether we like to admit it or not, it has an effect on even the hard-working B2B marketing sector which normally eschews glitz and glamour and all-things consumer-related for pictures of machinery, bulleted copy and headlines that often make unsubstantiated claims of “excellence” or “quality.”

In a hamburger or luxury car, we might intuitively know what makes one “quality” and the other “not-so-quality” – but in a metal press, elevator, drain cleaner or commodity, that standard starts to get a little more difficult to define. Especially in bullet points.

So, what’s the point?

The point is that even if your ads, website and collateral material is as good – or better – than your direct competition, that’s not the only group of images (or brands) you’re competing with. We all have a consumer-oriented quality standard that has to be met in order for our claims to be considered reliable and reasonable.

Ask yourself if your business is presenting itself in a way that would stack up respectably against leading brands like Pepsi, Nike or Cadillac. For some folks who deal in both B2B and consumer arenas (John Deere comes to mind), the decision is obvious.

So what are some simple – and relatively cost-effective – things your business can do to make sure it presents a competitive image?

1) Make sure your visuals are high quality. This means you should make sure your pictures are in focus and color correct. Hiring a professional photographer who understands how to use light can make a significant difference, but even if you end up taking your pictures yourself that doesn’t mean you should be satisfied with blurry or under-exposed images to tell your story.

2) Tell your story in complete sentences and save the bullets for the reinforcements. In fact, when we write B2B copy, we start with the bulleted points (after all, those should be the most important, right?) and then write the copy from there. But when we put together the layout of a brochure or ad, we lead with the complete sentances and save the bulleted points to use as either graphics inside an article or for the end in a specifications section.

3) Don’t mess around with your logo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen companies change their logo color to match their ad, squeeze their logo into a corner or stretch their logo to fill some space. Arggggh! If you’re that careless with your logo, what do you think a prospective customer thinks you might do with his order? Be consistent!

4) Always include your contact information – even if it’s just an e-mail address. As a B2B marketer, you have a distinct disadvantage versus larger consumer brands … your customer might not know where to find you. So you have to tell him. At the very least, you need to include an e-mail address but real life addresses; phone numbers and website addresses are always preferred in addition to the e-mail. And one other thing about that web and e-mail address – make sure it’s not a generic one (e.g. aol.com, hotmail.com, etc.) – you’ve got to appear serious and there isn’t much of an excuse anymore for not having your own domain name.

5) Keep your website information up-to-date. Nothing says “We don’t care about our business or yours” faster than completely out of date information on the company website. If you have a press section, make sure you have something on there that is no more than four weeks old. And, by all means, make sure your copyright notice is current in the footer of your website. I remember calling a company once who had an old copyright notice in the footer. I asked to speak to the president about updating his website and was told he had passed away … six months earlier. D’oah.

6) If you use on-hold messaging or music, make sure it’s relevant to the season. Ever go on hold and hear a promotion that’s already passed its deadline or suffer through Christmas music in June? It’s happened to me. Lapses like this tell customers you’re behind the times.

It’s just a half-dozen suggestions, but if you follow them, you’ll be able to hold your own against your competition.

Good luck.

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