Brand and campaigns in B2B tech: is safety your biggest risk?
Dull B2B brand work rarely looks like failure. The campaign launches, the media runs and nobody gets fired. Trouble is, nobody remembers it either. And as Sir John Hegarty points out, it’s hard to buy a product you can’t remember.
Most businesses have risk registers:
- // Cyberattack.
- // Regulatory change.
- // Customer churn.
- // Loss of a major account.
- // Supply failure.
Someone has usually scored each threat for probability and impact, coloured the boxes red, amber or green and attached the name of the unfortunate person responsible for stopping it happening. There’s rarely a metric that says “Nobody noticed us”.
That’s strange, because for a brand it can be one of the most expensive risks of all.
So how come it’s slipped under the radar?
Because invisibility doesn’t behave like the risks we’re used to recognising. A cyberattack looks like a cyberattack. A lost customer eventually appears in the numbers. A project running six months late is difficult to hide.
But being forgettable looks remarkably like everything working as usual. The campaign launches. The media runs. The impressions arrive. The sales deck is refreshed. Everyone signs the work off. Nobody’s furious. Nobody has to explain themselves to the board. The work simply passes through the world without leaving much behind.
It becomes one of marketing’s more treacherous ironies: we scrutinise the risk of doing something distinctive while barely acknowledging the risk of doing something unremarkable.
It’s easy to understand why. Different work necessitates a visible decision. Someone has to put their hand up and say yes. If it fails, there’s a point everybody can trace back to.
That idea. That campaign. That decision.
Safe work distributes responsibility much more elegantly. Nobody really chose it. It emerged. The headline was softened a little. Another product benefit went in. Sales wanted something more direct. A stakeholder thought their part of the proposition should feature.
Every decision made sense. Then everybody looked at the finished work and wondered where the interesting bit had gone.
Nobody murdered it. It died quietly, by committee.
This is why dullness may be more usefully understood as a behavioural problem than a creative one. Nobody wakes up and thinks: today I’m going to make something utterly forgettable. Instead, we make a succession of small, reasonable choices. And those choices compound.
…dull advertising could need 2.6 times the investment to produce the same very large growth as more interesting advertising…
The problem would matter less if the safe choice were genuinely safe. Increasingly, however, the evidence suggests it isn’t. The Cost of Dull report, by System1, eatbigfish and Peter Field, was compiled to put a commercial price on advertising that fails to engage.
Drawing on the IPA Effectiveness Databank and System1’s emotional-response data, the analysis concluded that dull advertising could require around 2.6 times the media investment to produce the same very large market-share growth as more interesting advertising. That changes the nature of the argument.
For years, creative people have argued against dullness largely using creative metrics. Make better work because better work is better. Be more interesting. Be more emotional. Be more distinctive.
But if uninteresting work needs substantially more media money to compensate for its inability to make an impression, dullness stops being a matter of taste. It becomes an effectiveness problem. And B2B has particular reason to pay attention.
Whatever your argument was to have about exactly how emotional response translates into commercial effect, the broader point is difficult to avoid: enormous amounts of B2B communication are staggeringly (or rather forgettably) similar. You can see why.
B2B organisations are exceptionally good at rational justification. Complex products. Long buying cycles. Buying committees. Technical detail. Risk. Compliance. Procurement.
Every stakeholder has a completely sensible reason why the communication should become clearer, more comprehensive and more explicit.
Until the final result looks like a PowerPoint slide that escaped. This is where courage is misunderstood.
The answer isn’t creative recklessness. Different isn’t automatically better. An idea doesn’t become strategically useful simply because everybody in the meeting feels nervous about it.
Nobody needs another agency telling marketers to “be brave”, as though courage were an art direction style.
The courage that matters is much less glamorous. It’s asking: do we really need that? Are we adding this because it makes the idea better, or because it makes the idea easier to approve?
Is the research telling us to change the idea, or are we using research to reduce the anxiety of having an idea?
The conventional answer walks into the room already looking sensible. We’ve seen it before. We know how to talk about it. It resembles things that have previously been approved. And that delivered results.
Nobody stops to question whether those previously approved approaches delivered results because they were novel and memorable. Or because, second or third time around, they become wallpaper.
Perhaps this explains why organisations repeatedly choose work nobody particularly loves.
A genuinely unfamiliar answer arrives under suspicion precisely because it doesn’t come with the familiarity that makes ordinary ideas feel correct.
So we create an odd asymmetry. The new idea must prove it’ll work. The familiar idea merely has to resemble things that have worked before. One requires evidence. The other receives permission through recognition.
Perhaps this explains why organisations repeatedly choose work nobody particularly loves. It is easier to defend.
Maybe businesses don’t fear failure quite as much as we think. Maybe they fear lonely failure.
Collective mediocrity is politically cheap. Individual exposure is expensive.
Which means everyday courage is often simply the willingness to carry a little more personal responsibility in pursuit of a better collective outcome.
“I think this is stronger.”
“I think we’ve added too much.”
“I think we’re making it safer and worse.”
“I know this looks unfamiliar. That may be the point.”
Four seconds of courage. Brand immortality at stake.
That’s why dullness will never be solved by introducing one more creativity framework. The most important part is what happens in the hundred little decisions between the need for a creative brief arising and the work leaving the building.
Every one can make an idea slightly more distinctive or slightly more normal.
And normal has momentum.
None of this means throwing caution away. Brands have responsibilities. Products have to be understood. Claims need substantiating. Ideas have to work.
But caution isn’t cost-free. Every time we strip something memorable from an idea, there may be a media cost.
Every time we become more interchangeable, there may be a memory cost. That belongs on the risk register.
Because “is doing something different risky?” is the wrong question.
Of course it’s risky.
The more useful question is: compared with what?
With spending considerably more trying to make invisible communication visible?
With starting another year sounding exactly like your competitors?
With ticking off every rational reason somebody should choose you while killing off any of the untried, illogical, odd, emotive, intriguing reasons for them to remember that you exist?