7
Create a Lifestyle Brand for Your Category

I have to confess something. While I’ve spent my entire career working in B2B, I am completely and hopelessly fascinated by B2C marketing. It’s hard not to be as a marketer when you experience campaigns such as Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere” or basically anything that the teams at Disney, Nike, or Virgin America (a brand gone too soon) have produced.

B2C marketers are responsible for building and maintaining brands that speak to our very humanity as consumers, on a level that’s so much deeper than just products and features. They are emotive—developing relationship with their audiences and influencing affinity and purchasing decisions at an almost subconscious level. I aspire to buy a Tesla not because I think the vehicles themselves are any more luxurious than their German or Italian peers, but rather, I want to experience the future of transportation and do my part to help accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. Prior to having children, my wife and I would make an annual pilgrimage to Disneyland, not because we were particularly passionate about theme parks, but because we wanted to access the wonder and imagination of our childhood. The B2C world understands the power of brand in driving business results, a notion from which those of us in B2B marketing can draw inspiration, but seldom activate in our day-to-day jobs of building and optimizing marketing funnels.

But the world is changing. The B2H reality that I described in Chapter Two suggests that the B2B and B2C worlds are collapsing together under the weight of consumer expectations both at home and at work. Today’s marketer is challenged with solving for both short-term impact (feeding sales with enough leads to hit their number this quarter) and long-term impact of building a generational brand to last. In category creation specifically, striking a balance of both short- and long-term investments is critical. Participants in early markets will look to the market leader for both practical support on the day-to-day tactics within the category as well as long-term vision on where it’s headed. In order to empower both, the best device at a marketer’s disposal is still content marketing.

However, how many webinars have you watched in your personal life as a consumer? How many e-books (not from Amazon or Apple Books) have you downloaded for any reason other than work? As we discussed in Chapter Six, these form factors do indeed have an important place in your content marketing strategy, but are certainly table stakes for how businesses can deliver content to a professional audience. The future of B2H marketing will challenge every company to consider the same form factors and channels that end consumers interact with in their personal lives as opportunities to deliver value from the professional context. One of the underlying trends driving this imperative is the unbelievable success of one of the greatest categories created in the last two decades—Marketing Automation.

As more and more businesses developed content marketing programs and embraced the power of email as a distribution channel, our inboxes suddenly became flooded with content. Take a look at your email right now—some of the content sent to you by vendors is valuable, but for the most part, my assumption is that you’ll find a lot of noise that somehow managed to slip through your spam filters. It’s no surprise that the Marketing Automation category itself is evolving and being redefined to appreciate experiences for consumers on the other end of campaigns. Another response to the “noise problem” in email was the birth of the account-based marketing (ABM) category— a new approach to marketing that exhorts hyper-personalization of content and context delivered to a specific account (or hyper- targeted set of accounts), leveraging other channels outside of email such as display networks, direct mail, and the corporate website itself. The operating principle of ABM is that personalized campaigns will be much more effective than the alternative, eliminating any wasted effort and resources.

While ABM is a step in the right direction for Marketing Automation as a whole, it alone will not solve for the long-term brand-building motion that is required to create a category with widespread awareness successfully. In order to optimize for the long term, best of breed companies operating with a B2H mentality need to complement traditional content marketing (as discussed in the last chapter) with premium content and media programs that engage the consumers behind the logos they market and sell to. Like the traditional programs, premium content is not disconnected from growth and will undoubtedly have its place in the funnel—whether driving widespread awareness above it all or as a means of improving lead scores and uncovering buying intent within your market. The difference is the context from which the program is developed and inspired, where again, we look to our friends in B2C marketing who have already coined a term for this human approach to building affinity in the marketplace: lifestyle branding.

What Is a Lifestyle Brand?

You’ve likely never heard the words “lifestyle brand” uttered at a B2B company, but in the B2C world, the term is well understood. According to Lifestyle Brands: A Guide to Aspirational Marketing by Stefania Saviolo and Antonio Marazza, a lifestyle brand is “a company that markets its products or services to embody the interests, attitudes, and opinions of a group or a culture. Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of their products contributing to the definition of the consumer’s way of life.” Several examples of lifestyle brands come to mind—companies like Nike that have shaped culture around sports and fitness, or Harley-Davidson who developed attitudinal loyalty within their passionate fan base around the common ideal of freedom. These brands deliver so much more than just athletic equipment and motorcycles, but authentic and emotional stories of representative people in their audience who see life through a different lens. Those stories bind their audience together in the spirit of that shared perspective, creating affinity for the brand and, ultimately, selling more athletic equipment and motorcycles.

One of the best examples of lifestyle branding is Red Bull, the creators of the energy drink category. That’s the product they sell, but what they market is adrenaline, performance, and living life to the extreme. While Gatorade and other sports drinks were dominating the brand index of mainstream athletics, Red Bull saw an opportunity to go where their competitors were not investing and build affinity with a somewhat marginalized industry of sports that include surfing, climbing, skydiving, cliff diving, skateboarding, and others. The alignment to their brand promise was obvious, like some of the beverages they compete with, traditional sports were not quite extreme enough for the Red Bull consumer. They began to colonize these other sports categories as extreme sports, a community of athletes and individuals who were bound together by their shared passions for adrenaline.

Today, a simple glance at their website will reveal where Red Bull is focusing their marketing: a dedicated media studio that creates content for their audience, engages influencers within the community, and produces stunts that literally put athletes at the edge of the earth’s atmosphere. At the heart of it all—content. Content that champions the identity of their subculture, shines a light on their activities, and fosters interaction between members of the community. Building a lifestyle brand for extreme living has paid off for Red Bull, who according to Caffeine Informer, continues to dominate as the energy drink category globally and has captured 43% of the total energy drink sales in the United States in 2018.1

Developing premium content to create culture around your category will impact your bottom line and, beyond that, will cultivate and engage a faithful community around your brand that can last for generations.

Thinking about your content marketing philosophy as a lifestyle brand for the community in your new category is a powerful way to optimize for both short- and long-term outcomes. While articulating the “why” and educating on the “how” of your category are important, the way that the content is produced and delivered can help create and contribute to the culture of your community. For companies creating categories within the business context, an analog for lifestyle brand would be career companion—the sum of your content marketing efforts can inspire, guide, and motivate the professional development of the people in your community. Can your brand aspire to “do life” with those in the role that you serve? The answer is yes—by investing in the development of premium content and unlocking channels that are still relatively untapped from traditional B2B companies.

Digital Media

With the cost to produce high quality video content dramatically dropping (4K 1080p resolution now standard on all new iPhones) and social media continuing to connect our personal and professional lives, the opportunity to create and distribute high quality video content has never been easier. Going a step or two beyond the iPhone, many companies are building in-house video production studios with basic lighting kits, SLR cameras, and microphones for less than $10,000. According to Vidyard’s 2019 State of Video in Business Report, “a whopping 82% of businesses reported greater investments in video in 2018 and Vidyard’s B2B clients published 83% more videos on a monthly basis compared to the previous year.”2 While video continues to be popular for middle and late stage content assets such as recorded demos and customer testimonials, the idea of developing episodic, early stage content around the “why” and “how” of your category is where the innovation is headed.

Video will also add a face to your category, which can benefit both external and internal spokespeople. Featuring customers or non-customer members of the community is a great way to appeal to the novelty and status motivators of the early adopters in your category and provide them an opportunity to share their stories. Since video is an extremely engaging medium, the likelihood of creating a network effect around that content when shared in their networks will benefit both of your brands. Internally, video is an incredible mechanism to live your values and culture out loud and to build authenticity and trust in the market by positioning your executives as the embodiment of those virtues. In Chapter Eleven, we will take a closer look at how leveraging video in your executive communications strategy can become a superpower for your category leadership effort.

An emerging aspect of digital media is the introduction of live video—a channel that allows your audience to experience your brand and content efforts in a more raw and unrehearsed format. Live video streaming capability is now standard on most social networks (including LinkedIn) and can be created using anything from an iPhone to an SLR camera with professional encoder. At Gainsight, we were inspired to experiment with live video streaming during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. We noticed that every office we would visit during work hours, including our own, would have a soccer game streaming live on monitors prominently located in common spaces. We asked ourselves if we could create content for our community that’s so engaging that people would literally take time away from work to watch it together as a team.

That’s where the idea for PulseCheck was born—an all day live workshop that goes deep on the top seven sessions from our Pulse conference earlier in the year. The general principle was that conferences are great (more on that in the next chapter), but given the breadth of content on the agenda, they are difficult programs to go extremely deep into any one topic. PulseCheck became an all day live experience that did just that—and every year will drive 1 to 1.5x the number of registrations than we do to our live conference. We also wanted to build a culture around PulseCheck, which like the World Cup, would spawn viewing parties at customer sites within our community. We promoted a viewing party campaign that challenged our audience to cancel all non-critical calls for the day, reserve a conference room, and commit to broadcasting PulseCheck all day as a free team-building exercise. For teams that drove the most registrations, or were on our named account list, we would cater meals to their offices in order to supplement their viewing experience. Although this may sound a bit like an all-day webinar (which technically it was), live video changed that perception in the minds of our audience and turned the would-be webinar into a live global experience for the Customer Success industry.

It’s worth considering other forms of digital media outside of video. I hinted at this earlier in the book, but a somewhat crazy campaign that we ran at Gainsight was to record and distribute a hip-hop song for our category called Customer Success (Who’s Fired Up?) on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else music is available. Yes, you read that right. We hired a performer, booked studio time at Capitol Records in Los Angeles, and produced a song that we positioned as the official anthem for our community. The idea behind the campaign was that our audience was on Spotify and Apple Music in their consumer lives anyway, and yet if they happened to search for Customer Success or Gainsight on those platforms, they would find nothing. What if instead on their way into the office one morning, they could discover a song that would get them fired up for work that day? What if in a very small (and maybe even random) way, we can serve them in the unlikeliest of places for an enterprise software company? The campaign ended up being wildly successful, but we didn’t truly know how successful it was until our customers would film music videos lip syncing to the song and send them to us—a crazy example of a point I made in Chapter Five, that communities can reflect the culture of the category leader.

Beyond recording hip-hop singles, there’s one other form factor for digital media that has become increasingly popular in both B2B and B2C playbooks. Have you listened to a podcast lately? The data suggests that you probably have—over 51% of the U.S. population has listened to one of the 660,000+ podcasts currently available online. In fact, podcast listeners have consumed an average of seven different shows per week in 2018, up from five in 2017. Like their digital media counterpart in videos, podcasts are great (and cost-effective) ways to create rich early stage content about industry best practices and feature the voices and insights of the community. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2019 report, 49% of podcast listening is done at home and 22% while driving in a vehicle,3 4 unlocking new opportunities for your audience to catch up on your content while not at the office. The cost to produce podcasts are relatively low as well—ranging from a laptop and software subscription, to developing an in-house studio for a few thousand dollars, to leveraging a specialized third-party agency such as Sweet Fish Media to run your podcast operations on your behalf. Whatever your approach, create the official podcast for your category before any of your competitors beat you to the punch.

Education and Career Services

People consume information in different ways—in fact, there are seven distinct learning styles that humans can employ. We often prefer a mix of several different styles, but one is dominant in the following categories:

  1. Visual (spatial): Prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
  2. Aural (auditory-musical): Prefer using sound and music.
  3. Verbal (linguistic): Prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
  4. Physical (kinesthetic): Prefer using your body, hands, and sense of touch.
  5. Logical (mathematical): Prefer using logic, reasoning, and systems.
  6. Social (interpersonal): Prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
  7. Solitary (intrapersonal): Prefer to work alone and use self-study.

With education being such an important aspect of content marketing programs for early categories, marketers have a responsibility to create content that appeals to each of the seven learning styles above. One of the best methods for doing this is to work with an instructional designer to create an industry certification course (or catalogue of courses) that articulates the fundamentals and skills required for success in the new category. While this may sound complicated to execute, the “how to” content you’ve committed to creating in Chapter Six is where most of the heavy lifting is. An instructional designer can take the content you’ve already created, curate it into learning pathways, and deliver an educational experience for your audience through the lens of a learning management system (LMS).

The benefits of creating an industry certification program are many, especially since consumers will apply a premium to learn from the market leader. These programs are typically promoted at the top-of-funnel, meaning anyone can sign up for the online, self-paced courses without necessarily being a customer. You may decide to charge for the courses and generate revenue (perhaps to offset a portion of that over-stretched marketing budget). You could give the courses away, or at least a subset away for free, in order to seed the market. However you choose to price the offering, an industry certification program is a great way to drive online conversions and engagement from members or perspective members of your community. Additionally, these programs can be leveraged by Sales during a contract negotiation in order to sweeten the deal terms and protect any revenue on the product sale. Partners love industry certification too—especially if they have an opportunity to co-develop some of the coursework or co-brand the offering and sell licenses into their audiences as well. Eventually, you’ll know you’re successful when the program is growing your database, helping Sales close deals, and program graduates are displaying their certifications proudly on their LinkedIn profiles and résumés.

In the B2B context, a formal education program will often go hand-in-hand with career services. As category leaders, the market will make an assumption that your company is the go-to authority for not just how to be successful in the category discipline, but who is doing it really well. This will inevitably lead to a number of inquiries from the market for introductions to capable executives and practitioners in your network for open positions. Informally, keeping a spreadsheet record of candidates who may be passively looking for new opportunities may be a helpful exercise to aid in conversations like these. Besides, what better way to build a relationship with a potential client than by helping their leader (and your future executive sponsor) land an exciting new opportunity? You might also consider building a more formal program around career services for both hiring managers and active job seekers in your category.

An easy way to build a formal career services program is to launch an online job board for members of your community to post and apply to open job requisitions. If you’ve successfully transformed your corporate website into the online home for your category, the traffic on your site is extremely targeted and of high value to both job seekers and hiring managers. Give those visitors an opportunity to interact directly with the job board-of-record for your category in order to find new career opportunities, and consider pulling in curated data feeds from other online sources to keep the listings active and up-to-date. The best news of all—building a job board is very cheap and easy as WordPress themes are available on ThemeForest .net for $49 and can power the entire program. All you need to do is brand the experience and integrate the new job board into your corporate website. By developing value-added education and career service programs into the lifestyle brand for your category, you are sending a signal to the market that you care deeply and thoughtfully about their success and will walk with them along their journey. In Chapter Twelve, I’ll give you the tools you need to talk to your CFO about how these programs will also drive revenue—a powerful and important side-effect of driving success for your customers in new markets.

One of the companies in the marketplace that has done a phenomenal job of building a lifestyle brand around their category is Drift, the leading Conversational Marketing platform that turns website traffic into qualified meetings. Drift’s VP of marketing David Gerhardt (affectionately known as “DG”) is helping pioneer this new era of business-to-human marketing, and in building the Conversational Marketing category, is writing his own playbook on how to leverage digital media and creative activations to build a community around the concept of bringing humanity back into marketing. I asked DG what he has learned on his journey in building a lifestyle brand for marketers, and how that strategy has created a halo effect around the Drift brand. Here are five of the principles that he shared:

  1. Become a Student of the Game. From his early days at the company, DG was encouraged to read business books to help shape his thinking on how to build the marketing team at Drift. However, in addition to classic B2B books such as Behind the Cloud and Innovator’s Dilemma, he took to some brand marketing classics like Ogilvy on Advertising and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. Following his curiosity, he studied iconic consumer/CPG branding case studies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever to uncover how marketers outside of B2B differentiate in the marketplace by focusing on brand. There’s something profound behind DG’s curiosity here for B2B marketers—that inspiration for building a B2H marketing strategy may not come from peers in the industry, but from the lessons we can adapt from consumer and brand-oriented companies. Applying this learning at Drift, DG has become an early pioneer of B2H marketing and has built the foundations of an incredible brand with a loyal following and aspirations of category dominance.
  2. Understand the Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Content Channels. Signal-to-noise ratio is a science and engineering concept that compares the levels of a desired signal to the level of background noise. A ratio higher than 1:1 (greater than 0 decibels) indicates more signal than noise. As we discussed earlier in the chapter, the signal-to-noise ratio in content marketing today is off the charts. Increasingly, every company has a blog, webinar program, and maybe even a podcast. Even if your company has the highest quality of information that’s completely relevant to your target audience, the channel capacity within email and our social feeds will almost certainly limit your ability to get that content in the right hands. So how do you stand out? DG recommends trying new channels when they’re early and relatively green field from a noise perspective. Imagine the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns when companies first rolled out corporate email accounts—hello 85% open rates! One of the channels that DG leveraged early was LinkedIn video, a powerful and engaging method to connect and build a relationship with your professional network. With only his iPhone in hand and something profound to share, DG was able to break through the noise of the LinkedIn newsfeed and contribute to the marketing discussion in an authentic way.
  3. Zig While the Competition Zags. DG knew that the way Drift was going to win in the market was not to out-Adwords the best “Adwordser” in the market, but rather, to find a way to stand out by breaking through the noise and focusing on brand. It’s a simple idea at the surface, but profound in the context of category creation—how can we go where our competitors are not? The key to zigging, DG believes, is deep empathy for the customer. What could the Drift team create if they themselves were on the other end of the campaign? That thinking gave way to the Drift Insider program, a free content subscription from Drift that includes exclusive interviews with authors, management lessons from the brightest minds in business, how-to sessions at the whiteboard from top leaders in sales, marketing, and product, expert-level Conversational Marketing and sales education, and other themes of premium content programs. That’s the type of content that DG and the Drift team would choose to engage with to unlock growth in their own business and careers—not yet another vendor webinar. Nobody wants to be sold to—and as DG says, we as an industry have actually become allergic to sales in our consumer lives. Coming up with content programs that zig into the white space in the market while others zag can create meaningful engagement within our community, and pass that ever-important BS meter that has hardened our hearts as consumers.
  4. People Are Willing to Pay for Premium Content. With the success of the Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation categories, content has become somewhat of a commodity. Almost the entire library of the world’s information is only one Google search or “Hey, Siri” away. It wasn’t always this way. We can all remember a time when information was much more scarce—where ESPN dominated the sports conversation while CNN was our source of global news. Today there are thousands of sources of information, and understanding which sources are trusted over others has increasingly become a challenge. This has led to a new reality where customers are willing to pay for content that they can trust and deem better than what’s readily available for free. The old adage of “you get what you pay for” may be true in this context—consumer buying patterns have signaled a willingness to pay for content that’s perceived as exclusive or comes at a high quality of production. Consider recent consumer examples such as Apple News+, Disney+, or ESPN+ that are paid premium offerings on top of the core services that are typically available for free or cheap. DG believes that charging for content is a great conversation starter, and with the success of the Drift Insider+ program, the data supports his vision for this. Charging for professional development content can be a great way to access budget within your target market outside of software, and perhaps with the blessing of your CFO, even self-fund the creation and distribution of the marketing program itself.
  5. The Publishing Industry Still Matters. I noticed that Drift had published several books, and after talking to DG about this, I wondered if there was any correlation behind these programs and his passion for reading. As it turns out, one of the company’s core values is Students & Teachers, which inspires a culture of always learning from and teaching one another. The reality is that anyone can write a 300-word blog post—we see examples in our everyday lives of armchair quarterbacks weighing in on “best practices” online in 280 characters or less. Writing a book, on the other hand, is a statement—or in DG’s words, a book is a book. It takes a lot of effort to really pour your heart into 60,000+ words and make it real, signaling to the world the depth of thought and intention that went into putting that piece of content together. The reports of the death of publishing, as it were, are greatly exaggerated. DG suggests that not only is self-publishing easier than ever, but printing books (rather than distributing them online) is not an expensive exercise. The market will place a premium on physical copies over digital given the rationale above, and making physical copies available to the community is a great way to delight. If you’re creating a category, writing the book on your category is a competitive brand advantage all to itself.

By focusing on bringing the humanity back to marketing, DG and the Drift team are helping usher in this brand new era of B2H marketing. The net effect of these programs and others have solidified Drift’s leadership position in Conversational Marketing—the category that they themselves are creating. Another outcome of their efforts has been the development and curation of a passionate and loyal community of brand advocates (whether customers or otherwise) who look to Drift for leadership on how to drive marketing outcomes and self-actualize in their careers along the way. Community is one of the most impactful content delivery vehicles for category creators, and when done right, can build a competitive moat around your brand unlike any other program.

Notes

  1. 1 James Foster, “Top Selling Energy Drink Brands,” Caffeine Insider, February 7, 2019, https://www.caffeineinformer.com/the-15-top-energy-drink-brands
  2. 2 “2019 State of Video in Business Report,” Vidyard, 2019, https://www.vidyard .com/state-of-video-report/
  3. 3 Ross Winn, “2019 Podcast Stats & Facts (New Research from Mar 2019),” Podcast Insights, March 6, 2019, https://www.podcastinsights.com/podcast-statistics/
  4. 4 “The Infinite Dial 2019,” Edison Research and Triton Digital, March 6, 2019, https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/