It’s important to define your voice very carefully before starting a conversation with your consumer today.

There has been a lot of talk about the impact of social media and the online world on brands.  The typical patter goes something like this:

“The conversation is no longer one-way, with marketers sending messages to consumers. Now the consumer owns the brand and can say what he/she wants. Now it’s truly a two-way conversation and that changes everything.”

All true. But many reactionaries take this to mean that the brand strategy needs to be more fluid and less defined because of this new reality. Here, we disagree. Just because a brand is now in a conversation and cannot control both sides of the dialogue, does not mean that it need not know it’s own voice as well. On the contrary, we find that is more important than ever to deeply understand your Strategic Point of View and the implications for your voice in these conversations.

Just because you are in a conversation, it doesn’t mean that you can abdicate defining your own voice. Brands have always lived in the minds of consumers and employees. Now they can tell you exactly what they think at any point in time. And that is incredibly valuable. But, at the end of the day, it’s also important to focus on what you want people to believe about your brand’s reputation at the end of the day and to define your voice in the conversation on that basis.

To do this, we feel that marketers need to work ever harder to understand their brands in a holistic, anthropomorphic way. We eschew “brand personality” as it’s usually schizophrenic list of traits delivered by a committee. Defining the voice of the brand requires a more internally consistent understanding of the brand. For this, we believe archetypes are more useful. They present a consistent notion around who you are and make it clearer how to respond in a conversation.

There are classic lists of archetypes (the Hero, the Magician, the Lover, etc.) that have been referenced in books like The Hero and The Outlaw but we find that there are other useful archetypes that can be created as original thoughts to drive the brand. The “MOA” or Man of Action archetype that we created for Lee Jeans and Buddy Lee years ago is an example of a clear archetype that was brought to life for the clients and various creative teams by showing a reel of Harrison Ford movie characters over the years. Sometimes, archetypes exist in popular culture that are useful. Is this brand more John Wayne or Cary Grant? More Marilyn Monroe or Katherine Hepburn?

Overall, the new world order is not an excuse to make brands more fuzzy from a strategic perspective, but rather a call to arms to ensure your brand is truly and fully defined in a deeper, more nuanced way than ever before.

We humans don’t get to swap out our brains when we go to work in the morning. And decisions are usually made in the part of the brain responsible for emotions.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some world-class B2B brands in the last few years, across a broad variety of categories. But it seems we often go through a rough patch at the start of the relationship because Tait Subler is not a B2B specialist. Many B2B marketers seem to believe that a business brand is fundamentally different than a consumer brand. Consumer brands are routinely cast aside as unfit analogues. B2B is just too… different.

Many of the people who assert this most aggressively have never worked on consumer brands, so we wonder how they’ve come to this conclusion. These same folks often believe that the mushy, emotional stuff that is part of consumer brand marketing has no place in the rational world of decisions made in the work place.

And yes, there are some differences that need to be taken seriously as you address a B2B brand strategy. The sales force is a more important target segment and the decision-making process involves multiple people playing different and important roles. Complexity plays a role. But when we are trying to figure out the most compelling, differentiating way to position a B2B brand, we haven’t seen fundamental differences. Moreover, not all consumer brands are as simplistic as they are cast by B2B marketers. Every brand and every situation deserves its own attention and a customized approach to determining the best brand strategy. That is true of consumer and B2B brands.

We say B2B brands aren’t fundamentally different because they still need to be differentiated and relevant. And they still exist as concepts in the same place – the human brain.

The myth that some B2B marketers hold onto is that decision-making is different in a work context. It’s purely rational. We agree that the pressures and weight of a high-involvement business decision can be different than some consumer decisions, but in very complex decisions the brain science shows that people are more likely to rely on intuition and emotional parts of the brain. This is why we see B2B brands and consumer brands as fundamentally similar.

We humans don’t get to swap out our brains when we go to work in the morning. And decisions are usually made in the part of the brain responsible for emotions (see the work of Antonio Damasio at USC for more on this). This fact of our biology is the same in a B2B decision as it is in a decision about what kind of perfume to buy. Yes, we need to provide a rationale in a business context, but the decision often precedes the rationale. The rationale is used as armor for the decision made in a different part of the brain. And a B2B brand needs to address that emotional part of the brain.

Here’s an example that brought it home for me. We were doing a focus group with physicians (men and women of science and rationality). We showed them all the same data around a particular drug. They fought vehemently around its appropriateness to prescribe for a particular malady. And when we dug to the bottom of their dispute, it had nothing to do with the facts or the science. It had to do with how they wanted to be perceived by their patients and how they wanted to see themselves as physicians. On this they differed and it helped us define meaningful segments – based on emotional drivers. Not unlike how we created segments for Gucci.

A lot of sophisticated B2B brands are beginning to make the same kinds of connections with customers and prospects that great consumer brands do. They appeal to values and emotions as well as intellect. Look at IBM’s smarter planet effort or GE’s Imagination At Work as examples.  Our B2B clients are moving in this direction too.

Of course B2B brands have distinct challenges that need to be respected, but when you get right down to it, the best B2B brands and the best consumer brands are able to make powerful emotional and values-based connections that support the features and functional benefits they offer. And that’s what we set out to do in either case.

Thankfully, we now have another resource to inform brand theory and marketing. Neuroscience provides a treasure trove of new understanding about how the brain works, how decisions are made and even the best place for a brand to (literally) live in the brain. Where we used to euphemistically refer to the battle for real estate in the minds of consumers, now we are learning that there really is more valuable real estate in which to land your brand inside a consumer’s brain. We can take this learning and focus the type of brand strategy we use to make sure it is working on the parts of the brain where the strongest bonds can be formed.

Daniel Pink has obviously written about this in the recent past, as have others, but we like Giep Franzen who was a pioneer in applying brain science to advertising and brand thinking. Also, Antonio Damasio, who runs USC’s Brain & Creativity Center has provided some great insights for brand strategists.

The theoretical basis for brand strategy is much better for all this new insight, but just as importantly, we find that referencing brain scientists who scan the brain in functional MRIs is far more solid ground for brand theory than psychology ever was — especially  when you are trying to sell an idea in the boardroom. For some reason, it seems more concrete … more Scientific. We presented to a group of senior leaders at an engineering-driven company recently and it was amazing to see the difference in response to our arguments when we cited neuroscience. It kind of works like all those commercials with an actor in a white doctor’s coat I guess.

This is not to say that we don’t respect the work of psychologists, and behavioral economics is also enormously helpful to brand strategists. For instance, we credit psychologist Robert Zajonc’s work for much of our thinking about the systematic problems with certain testing methodologies. But there is no doubt that we stand on more solid ground when we can reference brain science in the real world of business decision-making.