The People Powered Brand by Chris Wirthwein and Joe Bannon

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Creating culture-driven, customer-centric brands that win in B2B

Let’s face it, selling B2B, considered-purchase products and building a strong B2B brand is vastly different and more complex than selling consumer goods.

The typical consumer brand approach focuses on external promotional activities, including advertising, logos and colors, PR, packaging, and sales promotion. In the B2B world, "considered purchases" always involve people, on both the buyer and seller side.

B2B brands and products often have much longer sales cycles, largely because considered-purchase decisions are rarely made by a single individual or only from an end-user’s perspective.

On the consumer-products side, marketing and brand positioning is left mainly to the marketing, advertising and research specialists. However, success in the B2B world comes from a corporate culture where employees at all levels of the organizational chart and the customer are engaged in building the brand.

Until now there has not been a proven method created specifically for B2B companies to follow for building a strong corporate brand. The People Powered Brand: A Blueprint for B2B Brand and Culture Transformation by veteran B2B marketers Chris Wirthwein and Joe Bannon lays out a plan for creating culture-driven, customer-centric brands that win in the B2B world.

Citing practical examples from their many years of global B2B brand building experience, the authors explain how to create a brand that employees understand and customers desire. Using their method, employees from the accounting office, to the HR department, to the shop floor will be able to communicate clearly, consistently, and at every customer touch point.

Drawing from their 60 years combined global B2B branding experiences, the authors deliver advice for company leaders on how to:

•  Gain meaningful, actionable insights from customers and prospects that go beyond identifying "needs" to truly understanding what customers want.
•  Apply The Five Foundations of a People Powered Brand to test ideas and strategies.
•  Infuse people-powered customer insights into all aspects of the B2B brand: strategy, messaging, communications and company-wide execution.
•  Find the optimal balance of owned, earned and paid media.
•  Engage employees to live the brand.

While it’s not quite rocket science, many companies fail to understand the importance of making a commitment to allowing the corporate brand to drive business decisions and execution. The People Powered Brand provides the rationale behind the commitment, and provides company leaders with proven methods for building and sustaining a winning B2B brand.

(168 pages, hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-9851795-5-7; February 2014)

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