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Tech democratisation will set the tone for 2021
Andrew Smit and Johan Walters
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5 sustainability trends that will shape business in 2021
Christelle Marais4 trends set to continue or be re-interpreted in the NGO sector
Innocent MasayiraStrengthening NPO skills and processes
Nazeema Mohamed, Feryal Domingo and Soraya JoonasSustainability is key for social investment in 2021
Keri-Leigh Paschal
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4 trends in employee skills development and training you need to know for 2021
Siphelele Kubheka and Desikan Naidoo
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Digital solutions need small steps to succeed
Xanthe AdamsMining looks ahead to more Covid risk
Ralf HenneckeMining's year ahead will demand deep innovation
Frederick Cawood
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10 predictions around fintech
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Andrew Duvenage,3 wealth management trends to watch in 2021
Maarten Ackerman4 strategies to rethink investing in SMEs
Kuhle MnisiMicroinsurance ready to reach new heights
Marius BothaFinding alpha in the age of Covid-19
Nema Ramkhelawan-BhanaPurpose or profit. It's not a choice
Mike MiddletonShifting towards a digital - but still human - approach
Henry van Deventer
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Healthcare innovation in 2021 and beyond
Reynhardt UysAre day hospitals the new trend?
Lee Callakoppen3 emerging medical scheme membership patterns
Nerine BrinkHealthcare innovations to look out for
Moshe Lichtenstein
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3 wide-ranging issues demanding legal attention this year
Jonathan Veeran, Nozipho Mngomezulu and Burton Phillips
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Wine in the wake of corona
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Rucera Seethal
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Auction industry survival depends on going virtual
Joff van ReenenCovid-19 drives new trends in local property market
Marcél du Toit
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A challenging year anticipated for SA retailers
Tasmika RamlakanA bold year for beverages
Alex GlendayThe rise of D2C
Michael SmollanAcceleration of digital payments
Jonathan SmitSafety vs sustainability - the packaging industry's key conundrum
Nthabiseng MotsoenengThe evolving e-tail landscape
Vilo TrskaThe path forward for retail in 2021
Matthew Leighton
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#BizTrends2020: Creativity's tipping point in business
Gillian Rightford, Adtherapist and business/strategy lead at SoloUnion. |
I want to talk about the trend of marketers in general, but business-to-business marketers specifically, and the executives to whom they report, realising that just over the short-term horizon is an unexplored continent of creativity where, in the words of the wonderfully articulate Martin Weigel, “disproportionate and sustained advantage awaits”.
I want to wish into existence the trend for CEOs and the other C-suite members to start understanding and absorbing the avalanche of proof about the effectiveness of creativity.For years, innovation has been a buzzword and a corporate goal in the corridors of power. What else is creativity if not innovation?
B2b should not stand for ‘Business to Boring’
If B2C advertisers struggle with short-termism and lack of creative risk-taking, then the real frontier to be broken through is in the B2B area. Currently, much B2B plays in the ‘Business to Boring’ space, relying on stock photos and images of glass skyscrapers and cheesy rational headlines.
Rational versus emotional decision-making (2016-status)
Everybody that is interested in the discussion about whether people make rational or emotional decisions - and all marketers are interested in this - should be aware of the background to the discussion...
Erik Du Plessis 5 Jul 2016
Is this because we believe that B2B decisions are made purely on rational factors?
The simple fact is that humans work in businesses. The very humans we are attempting to win over in the B2B space are driven by emotion as much as anywhere else.This isn’t “new news” – the Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, wrote about this in his must-read book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” where he describes the two different modes of thinking "System 1: instantaneous, driven by instinct and emotion” and "System 2: slower, driven by deliberation and logic”.
"Financial advertising is far from boring": Cullinan SA on their Midas Award wins
While the advertising industry is cluttered with award shows, the Midas Awards that recognise the world's best financial advertising are ones to watch as this form of brand messaging is aimed at gaining the rarest kind of consumer trust imaginable. Here's how SA's own Cullinan agency recently proved its weight in gold...
Leigh Andrews 15 Feb 2018
In his work, he proves that we attribute much too much importance to how ‘rational’ humans are in their decision-making: even when we think we are making rational decisions, our decision-making process is heavily influenced by System 1 beliefs, biases and intuitions.
Emotion rather than reason drives B2B decisions
Bradly Howland, account director of Epic MSLGROUP says that marketers, along with psychologists such as Nobel Economics laureate, Daniel Kahneman, have long understood that people are not rational decision makers...
So how do the humans we are communicating to about our business gather these beliefs, biases and opinions about our brand?
What happens in the siloes
For businesses that have both consumer and business targets, these experiences and impressions are formed in large part by their exposure to consumer advertising and experiences that embed themselves into their own personal System 1 reservoir. Funnily enough, humans don’t compartmentalise as much as our channel plans do.
Of course, we anticipate that our business customers will have seen some of our consumer advertising and activations, but somehow in the siloes, whilst the consumer marketers seem to be pushing for greater creativity based on deep insights (well, the good ones are anyway), it seems acceptable to throw that methodology in the bin and adopt a rational, fact-based approach to talk to business customers.
#StartupStory: How SoloUnion SA's plugging the senior-level agency brain drain
When former SA creative Matthew Bull started the SoloUnion talent collaborative in New York, he quickly realised this was just the model SA needed, so he recruited Rob McLennan and Gillian Rightford to lead this industry game-changer. Neither an agency nor a collection of freelancers in the strictest sense of the word, here's how their 'heads without the overheads' sharing economy creative solution works...
Leigh Andrews 5 Sep 2019
This is even odder when we consider the media weight, or budgets, put behind consumer vs business. There is a lot more of the consumer-facing messaging than the B2B messaging, so it would seem obvious to build on the “consumer brand” rather than to climb back down the benefits ladder to functional product attributes and differentiation.
What happens if you are a B2B brand that doesn’t have consumer-facing advertising? Can you be boring and rational then?
Asking the right questions means that you answer the right question
I read an article the other day by Tim Williams, whose wisdom I quote at least three times a week, which suggested that agencies should "Stop Filling Orders and Start Solving Problems"...
Gillian Rightford 29 Jan 2019
The answer is “No.”
The rise of human to human
The darlings of advertising effectiveness research, Les Binet and Peter Field, who recently launched their “The Long and the Short of it” report, turned their attention to the question: Does what works for B2C work for B2B?
Here’s what they found:
- 1. In terms of “the number of very large business effects reported”, brand building (long-term, strategic, creative) is 71% more effective than activations (short term, tactical).
- 2. While “fame” (or mental availability) increases B2C effectiveness by a factor of 4 and maximises profit, it is a whopping 214% more effective than activations in the B2B space.
- 3. Now to the crux of it – does emotion have a place in decision making in B2B vs rational consideration? In the B2C market, only 26% of decisions are made on rational grounds compared the B2B market where only 30% of decisions.
- 4. Differentiation turns out to be the weakest strategy compared to awareness and fame.
Via IPA Databank. |
- 5. And in case there is any doubt left, Fame and Emotional strategies outperform Rational by over 1000%.
Via IPA Databank. |
A survey of over 600 B2B marketers was conducted by The Marketing Practice, to understand the secrets of effective marketing, and to identify the behaviours that separate high-performing marketers from their competitors.
#BizTrends2018: It's not on top, it's inside
The truth is that almost everything has changed in the world of marketing communication - and those that own the data, have the power...
Gillian Rightford 2 Feb 2018
B2B marketers still place the most importance on the basics to drive effectiveness: In the first three places are targeting, a clear value proposition and creativity, and believe that insights and creativity will most likely help them succeed in the next five years.
Via The Marketing Practice. |
Bryan Kramer, the author of “There’s no B2B, it’s Human to Human, #H2H”, tells us that there is no B2C and B2B: it is simply #H2H – Human to Human.
Unexplored continent of creativity
Creativity in brand communication based on insights that inform powerful, motivating propositions to drive big, strong strategic creative ideas has been proven to work, no matter who you’re talking to.
That’s the trend I want to see.
Making digital brand communication human again
Take your social media marketing to the next-level - from B2B and B2C to P2P (person to person) and H2H (human to human). It's as easy as remembering that you need to be relatable and not sound like a computer, even if the message you're sharing has been automated...
Leigh Andrews 10 Apr 2017
As Kramer says, it's time to “bring back the human side of communication, in all its imperfection, empathy and simplicity”.
It’s the trend that I think simply has to start happening.
The C-Suite of any business cannot afford to continue to ignore these factors if they want to forge ahead for growth. It’s all very well changing titles from chief marketing officers to chief growth officers, but the growth can’t easily be found without exploring that unexplored continent of creativity.