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Three Voices Strategy

“Three Voices™ Strategy” is a new framework for understanding and closing the gap between the way today’s B2B companies try to attract customers and the fast-changing behavior of B2B buyers. A key goal of Three Voices™ strategy is to facilitate stronger brand engagement through peer recommendations
– buyers telling their peers how good a company or product is based on their own experiences.

Particularly suited to knowledge-intensive companies with discerning audiences, Three Voices™ Strategy rests on three concepts: Voice of Company, Voice of Industry, and Voice of Customer. These three distinct voices help B2B marketers to visualize and create a structured platform for engaging stakeholders, and the framework provides a set of implementation tools and processes.

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B2B and the tourism industry: Why mobile is key to successful digital strategy

by Angel L. Vidal

I have already covered the current growth and widening profit margins of the global tourism industry and the need for B2B companies and marketers in this field to develop a strong digital strategy if they want to capture a greater share of the market.

Here I cover one of the most important and fastest growing aspects of every forward thinking digital strategy in 2012: the mobile factor. Without leveraging mobile as an integral part of your digital strategy your carefully thought out plans might not be secured for the future – here’s why: Continue reading →

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Power up your product launches with a Voice of Industry

by Jonathan Winch

Many B2B companies focus their activities on that most holy of events, the product launch. The entire company tends to run like mad toward each launch just as small boys playing football all swarm around the ball, leaving the remainder of the playing field practically empty. It’s a costly affair, and one upon which the company’s sales and organizational energy can be highly dependent. But this kind of traditional, explosive product launch is quickly becoming a dinosaur.

Continue reading →

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Adobe, Inc.’s Voice of Industry

by Jonathan Winch

One example of an owned-media Voice of Industry activity is Adobe, Inc.’s CMO.com (www.cmo.com). Branded discretely with a small Adobe logo in the top right corner, the site offers “digital marketing insight for chief marketing officers”, including news items, trend articles, announcements, information about marketing analytics, resources and marketing-specific web sites, blog marketing, and other information about key players in the digital marketing space. The site carries articles, reports, surveys, statistics and commentary from industry experts and other digital marketing resources with a relatively long “shelf life”. Continue reading →

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Does Three Voices™ strategy work best for knowledge-intensive companies?

by Jonathan Winch

As the authors of The Death of Propaganda, which expounds the Three Voices™  framework, in our opinion, while its principles provide useful insights for companies of all kinds, a Three Voices™ approach is best suited to knowledge-intensive companies—in particular, those whose key audiences are strongly involved with the company’s product or service area. Take the example of Adobe Inc.’s Voice of Industry site CMO.com,  Adobe’s audience is highly interested (or should be!) in ways of optimizing their marketing activities via information systems. So done right, it’s not a especially difficult to get decision-makers, at least those in larger companies who can afford Adobe’s marketing automation system, regularly involved with the subject matter.

On the other hand, we’ve tried to imagine whether, for example, a manufacturer of stainless steel screws could benefit from implementing a Three Voices™ strategy. The answer, we concluded, was “unlikely”. We may be wrong, but we find it hard to envision regular, meaningful discussions or user communities thriving in company-owned or sponsored Voice of Industry contexts around the topic of screws. Few things please us more, however, than to have our views challenged and our eyes opened to new applications of this framework.

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Three Voices™ strategy and thought leadership

by Jonathan Winch

More and more, knowledge-intensive companies are beginning to talk about a comparatively new competitive parameter—at least in a marketing rather than a product delivery context. “Thought leadership” is business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas. The term is said to have been coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine, Strategy & Business, but hasn’t been widely used in B2B contexts beyond the publications of professional consulting firms. And it seems there’s money in it, too. IBM believes so strongly in the benefits of thought leadership that it established the Institute for Business Value (IBV), comprised of more than 50 consultants who conduct research and analysis across multiple industries and functional disciplines. In our own industry, we’ve noticed IBV publications such as the 2011 Global CMO Study turning up on the desks of our clients and being widely referenced in online Voice of Customer and Voice of Industry contexts, proving perhaps, that high-quality, credible content reaches far indeed.

We believe that thought leadership lies at the heart of a Three Voices™ strategy for knowledge-intensive companies, and that Voice of Industry activities are the prime vehicle for promoting your company as a thought leader.

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IntegratedB2B goes live!

by Jonathan Winch

Welcome to the very first post in what Michael Best, David Hoskin and I are hoping will be the first of a long line of knowledge-sharing, inspiring and at times mildly amusing insights, opinions and the like.

We’re calling the blog IntegratedB2B to reflect a gap we see in the literature – namely, that most of the attention is focused on online marketing where the real battle, in our minds, is on helping marketing and communication people to see the Big Picture, which for B2B (should) almost always involve integrating online and offline activities in a meaningful way.

IntegratedB2B is born from countless conversations my co-bloggers and I have with both professional colleagues and our B2B clients about how to close a steadily widening gap between the way they communicate with their B2B audiences and the way those same audiences want to be communicated to. And about how to use both offline and online tools in a tightly integrated way to do it.

Things have changed amazingly quickly in B2B marketing and communication. Yet it seems that many marketing and communication managers haven’t realized it. Nor have they realized how much they need to change what they’re doing to reflect a world in which the traditional B2B buyer is fast dying out. That lack of knowledge may sound unbelievable – and I risk stepping on some toes – but I’ve spoken with enough corporate marketers and communicators to know it’s largely the truth.

So that’s the first problem this blog will tackle in the months to come: helping B2B companies to understand the new breed of B2B buyer now ruling their world. The second is figuring out what to do about it. I’d like to welcome you on this journey, hoping that you will find inspiration and motivation in my own writings, those of my regular co-bloggers and others who have been advising B2B companies for many years. And I also hope that your participation and feedback will help to keep IntegratedB2B relevant and useful for years to come.

Glad to have you aboard!

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Your Content Strategy – why really, it’s the No. 1 factor in communication success

by Jonathan Winch

You will have heard the phrase “Content is King” uttered at numerous seminars aimed at enlightening marketing and communication professionals like yourself about the virtues of going online with your communication strategy. Forget it – it has all too quickly become old news. Instead, make way for what may seem like even more hype: “Content is God”. Continue reading →