Monitor Deloitte’s Camilla Marie Thiele shares her perspective on why business innovation is important for the sustainability agenda and how storytelling can inspire other companies to follow.
Deloitte: Storytelling boosts sustainable innovation
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Why don’t engineers trust blogs?
A blog can be many things. Fashion, food and lifestyle bloggers saturate the internet with millions of posts daily. But in B2B, do engineers have the same love affair with blogs?
Why ‘should’ can take a long walk off a short pier
Hot on the heels of an exceptionally hot European summer and CNN naming Copenhagen as the best city in the world for swimming, the nearby beaches and harbors are still teeming with people cooling off in the open water. When I complain about the heat, I’m often told, ‘You should go for a dip!’
The only valid reason I can see for swimming is to avoid death by drowning – but that ‘should’ stops me in my tracks. It carries a sense of obligation, judgement, pressure and, most of all, guilt.
I don’t like to swim, but I should.
Should is for things we don’t want to do. Should is based on the expectations of others. Should is inconsistent with our own values and how we want to behave. Continue reading
How to create affordable testimonial videos for employer branding
Most marketing or HR directors would love to have several high-quality employee testimonial videos to support the company’s employer branding efforts – particularly when it comes to recruitment. They also say, however, that it’s one of those difficult and expensive tasks that they just don’t seem to be able to manage with available resources. Frankly, I disagree that producing testimonial videos for employer branding is difficult – or expensive. Continue reading
Personal brand: can you control it?
The boundaries between your personal and professional brands are getting thinner every day. Whether we like it or not, we all have a personal brand. Some may flaunt it more consciously than others, but at some level most of us want to make a good impression. Continue reading
Please, no more propaganda
The disciplines and craft of journalism have changed corporate communications – for the better. New opportunities to cut through the noise and engage an audience abound, partly because so many companies still seem to believe that bragging about themselves in buzz words is the best way of making sure their target audience will understand the value of their brand.
Continue reading
Customer centricity: The ‘easy’ way to better business performance
In a B2B environment that is becoming increasingly competitive, there is growing interest in what actually drives business performance.
I was recently presented with some research by Professor Moira Clark of the Henley Centre for Customer Management, which concluded that making it easier for customers to do business is a sure-fire way of improving the bottom line. This takes the notion of customer experience one step further, and she claims that more companies are beginning to bring this line of thought into their strategic planning.
Essentially, it’s about having a customer-centric approach, and the research suggests that customer centricity in B2B drives business performance. The great challenge facing B2B companies, however, is how to change the business to become more customer-centric. For many, it may seem an unrealistic task. Continue reading
The CMO’s opinion isn’t always appreciated
When the CEO of all too many B2B companies sits down to decide on the three- or five-year strategy, a select group of executives are typically asked to front up with factual data and strategic opinions: The Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Commercial Officer and the Chief Operations Officer. Equipped with their inputs, the CEO usually feels he or she has enough information to formulate the strategy (perhaps supplemented with external advice). Then, and only then, the strategy is explained to the CMO. Continue reading
Not just another B2B case story
How often have you read a B2B case story and thought that you’d seen it before, just from another supplier? Same old, same old.
I’ve seen it often. You realize that what you’re reading is another product brochure disguised as a customer case story.
I was recently involved in what could have been a very interesting story, covering the journey traveled by the company and customer. It was a journey describing a strong, long-standing relationship and the use of market-leading technology (sorry about the propaganda), careful attention to detail, and excellent customer service.
But, most interestingly, it also covered how the company solved unexpected challenges that arose during the implementation of the solution. Continue reading
4 ways Danish companies can nail B2B marketing in English
It’s not that hard to write a blog post, a Tweet or an article, right?
All you have to do is think about what you want to say, structure it, then start tapping away at the keyboard. At least, that’s pretty much true if you’re a good writer and English is your native language!
Our Danish-based B2B clients, on the other hand, have an added challenge in comparison with competitors from English-speaking regions: producing high-quality English texts when English is their second (or even third) language.