By: Ric Marshall-Nicholls, Head of Planning

Time was when business culture and, well, culture culture were not only separate, but uninterested in each other.  

Oil and water. Church and state. Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise.  

But today, business culture…is culture. 

The CEO of Tesla hosts Saturday Night Live.  

Social media stars are billion-dollar businesses in themselves.  

Work and home life blend like never before. 

Business events like Google I/O are cultural events too.  

Nearly half of all Americans claimed to operate a side-hustle in 2021. 

All these truths—combined with a greater realization in the marketing community that B2B buyers are people too—gives B2B brands all kinds of opportunities to grow by impacting culture in broader and deeper ways than ever before.  

How might they do it? A few thoughts. 

First—in the words of renowned marketer Wayne Gretsky—don’t skate where the puck is, skate to where it’s going. Or, to use an analogy more common in the advertising world, being culturally relevant means shooting ahead of a moving target in order to hit it. 

But while that’s pretty well established in B2C circles, it’s less so in B2B. Staid cultural references abound in advertising and beyond (want the attention of the C-Suite? Golf celeb should do it) despite the fact that most B2B buyers are Millennial or younger. 

Slack knew this waaaaaay back in 2014—check out their Parks-and-Rec-style-mocumentary here for a fresher and more culturally relevant approach to marketing.  

For a more modern take, I’m very much enjoying Helen Edwards’ new book From Marginal To Mainstream on how businesses should look to the margins for the next opportunity or cultural wave to ride.

Another idea: find the sweet spot where business and life connect. In a previous life I worked on LinkedIn’s ‘New Professionals’ campaign. This campaign was based on the truth that behavior on the platform was mimicking the broader breakdown of the walls between work and life we can probably all recognize. Being professional didn’t mean leaving the personal at the door.  

That blurring of the lines wasn’t just true of the advertising—it was also an increasingly valuable business-driver (the platform now makes money from content and advertising than job postings).  

For another damn-I-wish-I-did that example of that, check out Spotify’s A Song For Every CMO campaign, blending business benefits with a very personal insight into the music tastes of a hard-to-reach audience through the medium of personalized songs.  

Suggestion number 3: bring business and consumer campaigns closer together. So many of the businesses we work with are in some way two-sided, speaking to businesses on the one hand and consumers on the other. And while often there’s a kind of church-and-state separation between the two, smart businesses realize that those two sides aren’t as different as they seem. A good example? Check out Zoom’s partnership with the very B2C Good American fashion brand to sell some good ‘ol B2B features like Zoom Events. 

And finally, don’t forget internal culture too. Not only are employees the best advocates (and, let’s be honest, very occasionally detractors) of a brand, but a great internal culture is attractive to potential clients and customers too. Bottling and growing that culture—and linking it to the external brand perception in a logical way, is a smart alternative way to drive culture. If you’re interested in that, fortunately at Iris we have experts in that very thing to help you.  

 

Have a great day. 

Ric