mobium | surveys and polls - research data to help you plan your marketing
Current survey results:
No current survey
Past survey results:
American business brands abroad
Are you a b-to-b media multitasker?
How are your ROI measures measuring up?
How is your business attempting to reduce costs and improve efficiencies of marketing communications?
How do you approach Customer Communications?
What's wrong with business-to-business communications?
What's the sneakiest email spam you've ever received?

WE ASKED:
“What's wrong with business-to-business communications?”

YOU ANSWERED:
 Respondents got to pick three of the choices below. Next to each is the percentage of the response it received.

74%

Tries to say too much or show too many things, so the message gets lost.

66%

Doesn’t address the needs, concerns, problems or questions of the audience.

39%

Full of company chest-pounding. Companies are obsessed with talking about themselves and how great they are.

38%

Talking more about their company, product and services than what the audience would gain from them.

28%

Lack of human interest, emotion or passion.

20%

Too safe. They don’t take any creative risks to stand out.

19%

Contains expected stock photographs of office environments complete with multi-ethnic groups of corporate stiffs.

13%

Lacks visual interest. An abundance of unvarnished facts, figures and specs that are not in a human context.

6%

Talks down to the audience.

4%

Too much business-speak, jargon and acronyms.

2%

Uses irrelevant borrowed interest.

2%

Campaign executions don’t look like they came from the same company.

1%

Poor production values, weak layouts and bad photography

Now what did the folks at Starch say about bad b-to-b? Funny you should ask. These famous readership research folks looked into this issue by physically auditing b-to-b ads and concluded that business communications don’t often make an effort to stand out, to be distinctive and involving. Business advertising, they say, fails to use three important creative principles of effective communications. Here are the details of their findings:

1.  Business ads are distinctly unvisual. “Business ads tend to be more about content than appearance,” Starch reports. “Many use several illustrations and concepts in the same ad—as opposed to a single, powerful image and one unique selling proposition—to get key points across. This could be due to the supposition that business-to-business advertisers expect their communications to be viewed by an audience hungry for information, and therefore willing to work for it. People will read [long copy] but they must be invited in [to the message]. And the best invitations use illustrations that delight the eye.”
2.  They emphasize the abstract rather than the human element. “Business-to-business communications overestimates its viewers’ interest in their products,” says Starch. (Enough said.)
3.  They do not emphasize benefits. Says Starch: “The one great failing in most business communications is the failure to tell the viewer what the product will do for them. The problem seems to be that business-to-business companies assume that readers are as interested in their product as the company is. This is rarely the case. There is no great secret to success. The key point to remember is that the best communication pieces are like a good conversation. All business communicators should remember the words of Benjamin Disraeli: ‘The art of conversation consists of the exercise of two fine qualities; you must originate and you must sympathize; you must possess at the same time the habit of communicating and the habit of listening. The union is rare, but irresistible.’”

To see whether the opinions of b-to-b practitioners reflected these findings, Mobium surveyed e-mailed business marketers as well as mobium.com visitors and members, asking a series of questions designed to measure their opinions compared to Starch’s physical audit. Marketers were asked to name the three biggest problems with business-to-business communications.

The Mobium analysis
There is a general agreement between the impressions of business marketers and the three points expressed by Starch in their visual audit analysis. Mobium feels, however, that "visual interest" is not as top-of-mind for business communicators as it was to the experts at Starch, who were visually auditing ads. Additionally, the problem of “trying to say too much” seems to be more important to marketers.

The Mobium bottom line
If marketers concentrated on developing and judging business communications on the three points found by Starch, they might discover what their audience is interested in hearing and seeing. Marketers should try to focus on what they can uniquely contribute to this dialogue of interest to their customers and prospects rather than attempting to jam messages down the audience’s throats with the hope that they will magically imbed themselves in the minds of their intended audience. When you have a human dialogue with your prospects and understand what they are interested in hearing about, the issue becomes saying enough, not saying too much.

A Mobium thank you: Congratulations to the winners of the autographed copy of Emanuel Rosen’s “The Anatomy of Buzz.” We hope you put it to good use. Thanks to all participants. And for those of you who like to watch...