Why B2B Companies Can’t Wait Decades for a Brand RefreshWhy B2B Companies Can’t Wait Decades for a Brand Refresh

Why B2B Companies Can’t Wait Decades for a Brand Refresh Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: Jeff, all is well in my world. How are you doing?

Jeff White: I’m doing fantastic. Thank

Carman Pirie: Yeah, excited for today’s show and always good to be recording with you. And we I think we could be accused sometimes of, I don’t know. The show maybe doesn’t always, doesn’t… I can’t pick just one or two areas of focus, but I would maybe say we could be accused then maybe of the opposite of not…

I don’t know that we focused on brand a whole lot. So yeah, fun to jump into a bit more of a thorough discussion of same today.

Jeff White: Yeah, and I think it’s always an interesting thing, especially when you’re talking about B2B manufacturers. The notion of brand isn’t necessarily as well understood amongst many of these companies.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and even if it is understood, it’s not as well adopted or exercised at the very least either…

Jeff White: We wanna be like Apple!

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah.

Jeff White: Yeah. So joining us today is Michael Barber. Michael is the CMO at StarTech. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Michael.

Michael Barber: Thanks, y’all. It’s great to be here.

Carman Pirie: Michael, it’s awesome to have you on the show, and I apologize in advance if I keep thinking about you like a small Motorola phone from my early days. I can’t think about your company without thinking about that damn Motorola phone.

Jeff White: And they’re not related, so they just sound alike.

Michael Barber: Although we could probably charge that phone. We probably have a cable that would still charge that phone, so

Jeff White: That was a cool phone though. To be honest. Was pretty good

Carman Pirie: It was. But, speaking of brand, they obviously did a great job because we associate exactly, we know what we mean when we say that phone and that name.

Jeff White: Yeah, but where’s Motorola today, huh? Where are they today?

Michael Barber: That’s a great question. Yep.

Jeff White: Radios, my friend. That’s the future.

Carman Pirie: But Michael, look I appreciate that you have nothing to do with the Motorola phone, but perhaps tell us a little bit about StarTech and what you’re up to there and and maybe how you arrived there as well. So tell us about the company and your journey to get there.

Michael Barber: For sure. So StarTech’s been around for forty-two years. We’ve been helping IT professionals make the hard-to-find easy, connecting everything from the data center to the desk. What does that mean? It means cables, docks, adapters, every cable that you’d find in small business to enterprise-sized organizations, and have been doing that well for as mentioned, almost forty-two years.

I came to StarTech through a really interesting journey. I was speaking at a conference about twenty-four months ago, and our founder and CEO, Paul Seed, was sitting in that audience and apparently liked what he heard, and we got started on a conversation in terms of just some things that were happening in the organization.

They had largely been a channel-driven organization for those sort of first thirty-five to thirty-six years, and as COVID hit, very much realized they needed to build a more proactive go-to-market strategy and exist outside of channel because organizations were coming directly to them. And the marketing team wasn’t built to service a go-to-market strategy like that.

So after many conversations and some deep thoughts, I decided to exit the role that I was at beforehand, something that I was really passionate about and happy in and jump into StarTech to rebuild the team, the people, the process around what is a very different go-to-market strategy that the business has been realizing over the last few years

Jeff White: Very cool. I remember I was doing a touchscreen kiosk design where we also spec’d the hardware back in 1998, and I think that StarTech was the only one that made a cable that would connect this MPEG video player card that we had to the monitor, and it was just all, very esoteric-type connections.

And I remember speccing things out and “We’re gonna need this card and this box and this cable, and we can only get it from them.”

Michael Barber: Yeah, we hear those stories all the time. That has been the bread and butter, so to speak, for the organization is yes, we make all the newest and latest and greatest, but we’ve also made the vast majority of the business has been built on onesies and twosies that are old technology connecting to potentially also old technology, but also new technology.

And that’s what we’ve been so well known for those 40 years or so.

Jeff White: 77-pin SCSI to USB-C, huh?

Michael Barber: Something like that. Yes. Yes

Carman Pirie: This is where I’m like, “How do I get the conversation off of this ’cause I can’t understand any of it?” And

Jeff White: For once, Carman has nothing to contribute.

Carman Pirie: Often that’s the case. It’s just whether or not it comes with nothing to say at the same time. You mentioned that the company was very much channel driven previously, and you were needing to go more direct and build, the brand needed to build relationships more directly with its end users.

I was – When you said that, I was like even for… I can think of several B2B manufacturing organizations that are actually, they’re not channel-driven, but they’re sales and relationship-driven, and similarly have not relied on a relationship built around or centered upon brand. So I think there’s a tie that binds both of those realities and probably fits about 80 to 90% of the people listening right now.

Michael Barber: Yeah, and I think what – one interesting thing to think about is something we’ve talked a lot about over the last 24 months and something I think all marketers, whether whatever size organization that you are in right now is that your buyer is changing. Like for us, given the heritage of the brand our buyer was very different as at their core of who they are and where they find products and how they interact with media and brands.

It’s just a very different buying journey these days. And yes, channel is still a huge bench for us, it’s still significant for the organization, and we have no intention of ever neglecting that part of our business. But more and more, we find our buyers, the IT pros are going outside of channel.

They are exploring brands for their organizations that don’t even exist in channel in sometimes, and if they do, they exist in one that we’re all familiar with, which increasingly is the channel marketer of choice for IT pros, and that’s, Amazon. And so we know that in order to be successful with what is a changing buyer and a very changing journey and media landscape, we have to build relationships outside of channel.

We have to build relationships and an understanding of who we are, what we believe in, what our products mean, and who we serve through brand because of all the things that are occurring from an external factors perspective around how our buyers go around making decisions of where they’re gonna buy and how they’re gonna procure.

Jeff White: How much of that is based on new entrants in the competitive marketplace and folks that maybe are not coming at it and don’t have the B2B IT professional history that StarTech has, but are able with, new contract manufacturing processes and all those sorts of things to be able to, get into that space and grow a brand, almost B2C-esque brands coming online and then you guys looking at it and going, “Oh. Oh no we really need to address this because otherwise we’re not gonna be able to compete there”?

Michael Barber: Yeah, this is such a good observation because that is the other external factor that we have, we’ve been working through and mitigating and discussing very much as a brand is these, these startup competitors that, weren’t around in our ecosystem for many years and have certainly built their, what is increasingly becoming a B2B play, but built their brand and their product ecosystem around a consumer marketplace, largely driven by the marketplace that we just noted, which is Amazon.

And then understanding that because they’ve built a moat, they have built a competitive opportunity inside of a consumer mindset, have started to understand that the, the next biggest revenue opportunity is to go sell into the enterprise, to the mid-market to enterprise buyer. And given the buyer has changed and some of those buyers have grown up with those brands because they’ve transacted largely in the Amazon or similar ecosystems, start to add those brands and those products into the mix for procurement, and we’ve gotta be able to understand how that changes the perception of our products and changes the perception of our brand and make sure we’re on that shortlist as well when those types of buyers are selecting products and competitors that we haven’t seen before.

Carman Pirie: Man, it hadn’t occurred to me until you said that in hearing you two go back and forth on that point. It’s that the, those competitors are from birth brand first. They actually aren’t capability first at all. In many cases, the capability is crap. The quality’s not there, but you don’t find that out until you make the bad purchase decision.

But they got the brand nailed. And an incumbent such as yourself it’s the exact opposite. They’ve lived for 42 years or whatever on quality first, and now they have to try to figure out how to communicate in a brand- first world.

Michael Barber: Yeah, and it’s also interesting we have existed because of quality. That is one of the things when we ask whether it is unaided or aided research studies around our competitive set particularly in the aided research, there are two things that always bubble up, and that is our commitment to our customer and customer service, but also the quality of our products and how long they exist.

And we have been known, and there are many stories if you go do a little research on StarTech, whether it’s Reddit or some other IT-focused community forums, there are a lot of stories where w-where people have posted, “Hey, I had this random StarTech product and it broke, I don’t know, 12, 13, 14 years after I bought it,” and we will take it back, and we will send you a new product if we’ve got it in or if you – if we can somehow source it.

And that’s what we’re known for. But if someone asked, if you were to ask the average I sat down with a one of our our head of accounts at HubSpot as we were replatform- replatforming our demand gen systems over the last couple of years, and he said, “Oh my gosh, I was so excited to talk to you because I’ve had this dock sitting on my desk for 12 years since I joined the company, and it said StarTech, and I didn’t even realize you guys were like a company.”

And it’s that sort of feedback of within an IT pro community, we’re really well-known, but in the average consumer mindset or someone that doesn’t exist in, inside of our buyer profile, we’re not known. And that is a challenge because we clearly have not built the brand of selection or at least a brand where someone can have a distinct relationship with and understand who we are and goes, “Ah, I thought you guys were some, random brand that our organization had bought. Turns out you’re not.” And I go, “Yeah that’s intentional, but that is the point of why I’m here is because we need to be able to tell that story not only to the buyer, but the people who use our products as well, because we’ve got to build belief with them just as much as we have to build belief with our buyers as well.”

Jeff White: I remember wandering around the HubSpot campus, and they had vending machines for HubSpotters that they could grab tech and just charge it to their account kind of thing. And there were like Apple keyboards and, things like that, but there were also a lot of different adapters there, and I bet you they were all StarTech adapters running in these Coca-Cola vending machines just for tech.

Michael Barber: Yep. We sell a, a lot of vending optimized products. In fact Amazon is a massive buyer of vending optimized products. So we’re distributed inside of all of their vending machines across it’s some enormous number of distribution centers, 200 or 220 around the country. And now globally, we’re starting to head into about 20 countries where they also have DCs as well.

Carman Pirie: I wanna understand a bit of the anatomy of this transition that you’ve been living over the last two years so that our listeners can better understand what it means to go from a largely channel-first strategy to something that’s a little bit more brand-centric and bring brand into view for a B2B go-to-market.

So talk to me about that program of change, what that looks like. What are the key shifts that you are trying to inspire along the way?

Michael Barber: Yeah. So there’s probably a couple of things I’ll hit on both. There’s some requirements as we’ve gone through this transition that are both internal and externally focused. Internally, we’ve obviously had to build teams that can serve a more proactive go-to-market approach. That involves building sales, marketing, commercial teams that have that level of experience.

And so we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on augmenting and adjusting our people and the processes o- of how they do their work to serve a different go-to-market strategy. So there’s operationally a lot of internal work that has occurred to set the business up to do and realize that new or refreshed, I should say, it’s not a new go-to-market strategy ’cause it’s been done many times before, but for us, newer, if you will.

So lots of work internally on people and process and the rhythms and rituals that go with how we drive demand and build preference and service a direct customer versus through channel. So there’s been enormous amounts of work around that internally. And then externally, there’s a couple of key things we have done that I’ll touch on to the extent that I can.

One, if you’re gonna build brand, you need to build a brand that is recognizable and contextually relevant. And the first thing that – I don’t think this was a realization, this was a necessity. We had not done anything to refresh the visual strategy. By visual strategy, all the logos, the colors, the look and feel, the voice, the tone, all of those things.

The classic brand refresh that every new marketing leader likes to start. We needed to do that as well because the last time the company was refreshed was almost two decades ago, and it felt like that. If you go look at our website or find us anywhere online, we feel like a 40-year-old organization.

We feel a little bit middle-aged. We do not feel so culturally and contextually relevant. We are more

Carman Pirie: I take offense to that as a 51-year-old marketer. Please carry on…

Michael Barber: I’m almost there with you, so I take offense personally as well. But it was just – it’s just a fact. We do not feel relevant in a space where people are buying products from brands that feel very relevant and feel new and refreshed. And so we knew we needed to build a visual strategy and refresh the brand for a more modern, relevant consumer and for a more modern and relevant media mix that requires very different things.

And so we spent a significant amount of time, almost 14 months, on that refresh, and it will debut towards the end of this year. And I cannot wait to celebrate it with the team because It is not just a visual strategy refresh. We really have done the work, I think, to change not only how we feel externally, but how the organization is going to work internally.

And so it is as much of an internal and external change that we’ve ever done over the last, let’s say, 15 to 20 years of the organization. So a brand refresh was necessary to be able to put our flag in the sand and say, “This is who we are and how we’re gonna operate and how we’re gonna feel.”

And that’s going to be extended to not only how we market ourselves, but also how we design products in the future and the look and feel of those products as well, because the brand has to extend well beyond just our marketing channels. It has to be felt at every touch point, whether it’s someone calling in for support, whether it’s somebody getting a question answered on Reddit, or whether it is the physical product that sits on their desk or sits in their data center.

And so that’s transformational work that’s happening internally and externally. Also, we have to make sure that we don’t forget who our core customer is in that work as well, and so that, that was a, an important part of that work. And then we had to put the systems in place, and the people that could utilize those systems to do more of a proactive go-to-market strategy where we are leveraging, sales enablement tools or demand generation tools that our sales teams can utilize to build those relationships and, build account-based marketing programs and all of the tactics that we use to have conversations and build relationships with buyers in mid-market to enterprise.

So a lot of work both internally and externally and just a few of the key things that were part of this process.

Jeff White: Are you rolling out other things around how people talk about StarTech, how the sales team talk about that before the launch of the new visual identity and trialing those messages? Or is it more just getting people comfortable with the new language and that? Or I don’t know, I guess what’s the rollout strategy for that?

’Cause typically the brand, visual brand part comes first, and then everything else is played out after that.

Michael Barber: Yep. I’m not gonna say we’ve done it perfectly, but I think we’ve done probably two or three things really well. Number one I’m a huge proponent that any time you’re gonna go through a brand refresh, it cannot be the marketing leader and the marketing team that leads it. It has to be co-collaborated across any, basically any single team that touches your commercial operations.

So for us, that was pulling together a cross-functional team that sits in not only just marketing, but sales, customer success, customer support, operations, logistics, HR who we refer to as people and talent inside the organization, because those perspectives matter, and you have to… as a marketing leader and a marketing team, you have to bring them on that journey.

This cannot be, “Hey, marketing’s packaged this up in a little box for you, and here’s your new brand. Now go.” It just doesn’t build buy-in. So we were very focused on ensuring that there was not only specific people in the room to have those conversations and give perspectives from a feedback perspective, but also people that we could have rounds of rollouts as we started to land the logo and the fonts and the colors and the voice and the tone and the words that was gonna define the new brand and got buy-in over six months as we did that internal rollout. But then there are very specific internal launch programs around how does this shift how we talk?

What’s our elevator pitch? How does this define different product categories? Do we change nomenclature? All of those things that are important to ensure that the brand is felt well beyond just what the logo looks like. We’re also really fortunate, so Paul, our CEO, has been obsessed with customer centricity since he started this business, and we’ve worked really hard to make sure that we have customer panels in all of our key verticals and also just sized by type of customer, down from a mom-and-pop business all the way through some of our enterprise customers like Amazon and Salesforce and Meta and the like.

And we meet with them quarterly and brought them along in this journey as well to show them, “This is where we’re headed and what we’re thinking. Give us your honest feedback. How do you think this resonates?” Asked them some tough questions and got some really good feedback as a part of that process.

And we just finished our customer symposium about two and a half weeks ago, where we officially rolled out the launch and what it’s gonna look like and what customers can expect next year as this launch occurs, and it was so well-received. And I don’t think it would’ve been that well-received if we didn’t do that work, bring our team along for the journey so that it didn’t matter if the marketing person in the room was the one pitching it.

Our sales leaders and our, and our account managers who were in the room as well, you could see how much they were bought into this change and this transition. Some of those individuals that were in the symposium are on our customer panels as well, and you could see how they could… They recognized that their feedback had been heard inside of these sessions.

And so that co-creation process and how you bring the team along to internally launch – is so valuable as you do any one of these brand refreshes because it has to be a co-created process. Without it, you’re not gonna get buy-in. You’re certainly not gonna get I think the type of feedback that you need to deliver something that still feels like the StarTech of the last 40 years, but sets the company up for the next 40 years of growth as well.

Jeff White: Man I don’t know if you can answer this question and maybe you can just defer, but what was the best piece of critical feedback that you got from a customer in those sessions, and how did you action it?

Michael Barber: I actually can answer this really easily. So as a part of any brand refresh, for those that may have not been with it, we start the visual and the commercial experience of what the brand is gonna look with what we call the big idea. And the big idea translates how we feel the strategy of the business is explored through the visual look and feel, and that big idea is typically rooted in a single human emotion.

For us, that was connectivity. And it sounds very simple, but connectivity is everything that our brand means to our customers because you can literally find a cable to connect anything to anything at StarTech. Within that big idea, we as creatives and marketers typically brainstorm some ways in, like a territory.

If you could – The easiest way to describe this would be like maybe it’s a tagline that brings the strategy to life in action. And we landed on three, and I sat through a conversation with not only just our internal team, but also our customers and and the biggest piece of critical feedback from a customer was, “That sounds too much like a consumer brand. It’s too kitschy. It’s great, and I love it, but it makes me think, oh, is StarTech trying to compete in the consumer space now?” And that was really good feedback to hear because we, as creatives, loved this territory. We were like, “I think this is the right territory.” But that feedback, made us sharpen the pencil a bit, think about it a little bit more, and was very pointed and very specific, and that was probably the moment out of all the opportunities we had to do it, where we sat back and went, “Okay, we’re probably not gonna lean into that creative territory,” or we’ve gotta sharpen the pencil a little bit more to get it to where it doesn’t feel like we are potentially evolving the brand to somewhere that it is not gonna serve our customer of today or tomorrow.

Jeff White: Love it.

Carman Pirie: This I wonder, I could be sending the this entire episode off the rails now but it only has a few minutes left, so the good news is if I’m doing that, it’s not for very long. But what occurred to me as you were talking about that was just, man and I think it, it comes back to a, a point that Jeff raised in a conversation that he and I had probably months ago now, where he was pointing out the differences about how consumer brands, maybe like a Pepsi or a Coca-Cola or what have you, like when we think of real consumer brands, that of, that very slowly and methodically evolve their identity over time.

There have been some pretty big refreshes and some mistakes along the way as a result of trying to go too far. But, there is a bit of a discipline in consumer brands around slow evolution, whereas it seems like every time we talk, even if we’re talking about a successful rebrand initiative on the B2B side, it’s usually always, “We’ve waited 20 years,” which sounds like it was like 15 years too long or something.

So I don’t know. My question now that the question that you inspired as you went through that was just like, do you think maybe we get it wrong in B2B and we should be thinking more about continuous evolution of brands so that we don’t have to reach this point where we’re ripping and replacing the damn Band-Aid?

Michael Barber: 100%. And if I had my way in any organization I was working in, we would have more budget and focus on brand. But this is a slow transition, I think, for more, for B2B brands, for the most part. I think enterprise brands very much act – enterprise B2B brands very much act similar to the consumer brands in that sense.

But anything below enterprise and maybe, into the mid-market, depending upon if they’re more of a high-growth startup, they don’t. They are, there are usually distinct moments of big rebrand, big refresh, and there’s a couple reasons why One of them is a risk, right? I hate to say it, but if you were gonna initiate a major rebrand inside of an organization, you’re staking your career on that rebrand. It’s an enormous amount of investment on both just the monetary resources, but physical resources inside the building. There’s a lot of marketing leaders that do not want to stake their careers on a rebrand because it can sometimes arguably go in a very bad direction.

And part of your career is risk mitigation. So it’s one of those, certainly. I don’t think there’s enough conversations happening about why brand is so important in B2B. And I think that’s because for years we’ve thought that just because the B2B buyer walks to their desk and sits down, they suddenly change their psychological habits of how they select and procure products.

And to, for me, and this is my opinion, but we could debate this, is I don’t think they do. I think consumers are consumers at the end of the day. Maybe that psychological recognition of that hasn’t trickled into the B2B conversation enough early, although it is happening more and more.

But there’s also, for us at StarTech we’ve got 4,275 SKUs at last count, and one of our key strategies as an organization is to have global availability and product availability when our customers need it. And anytime you say rebrand, our CEO can total the amount of money in a hot second of what it’s gonna cost to rebrand, not only just how we feel and experience as a brand digitally, but also from a hardware perspective.

And so it’s a massive, investment of time and energy. It’s a massive career risk to take that on. Our teams are a little bit leaner. We typically haven’t built the budget around a brand team like consumer brands have. You will see a dedicated brand team inside of most consumer organizations.

You do not see that in most B2B organizations. And so it’s a conversation of risk and budget and team size that allows these things to happen. But I think you’re seeing, there are certain brands I can point to on the B2B side. I’ll name two that I’m very familiar with.

Docebo, which is an AI learning platform; Ramp, which is a corporate finance procurement platform. I think those are brands who are doing this differently, that are evolving their brand much more methodically and faster and at a pace that’s different than most B2B brands because they recognize the value that brand brings to your organization.

I mean- Whether it is, forming that shortlist early for a B2B procurement manager, mitigating risk management, pricing power, demand gen getting cheaper, channel pull-through getting easier, the idea that all of our specs are converging and commoditizing brand helps that commercial effect that we need so much more than potentially other levers that we can pull as marketers.

And so I think it’s something you’re gonna see change especially as we consider how AI impacts the buying journey and the fact that AI picks brands and tends to surface brands it knows and that are getting conversations happening online easier than ones that don’t.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think we may have reached a moment when we think about at the start of this conversation, you were speaking about how buyers have changed and are changing. And and then we started talking about the reasons why we’ve been slow to evolve B2B brands. And it really comes down to the juice hasn’t been worth the squeeze is what you said, right?

Michael Barber: Yep, and I, yeah, I w- I will add on to that. My other boss is our CFO, right? When I…

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And the, but the thing that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and we and one of the reasons it isn’t worth the squeeze is that the person buying on the other end has been the same person for the last 30 years. They literally haven’t changed their a pale, stale and male as it were, right?

And but that’s changing to your point. The buyers are changing and that may be the trigger point that pushes B2B brands to say, “We need to be more active in our brand management as a result.”

Michael Barber: Yeah, I I think right now in, in the context of where we find ourselves I’ve got to show as a marketer and a business owner and leader, I have to show results now, right? And so a lot of our money and effort is around actions and activations and demand gen that shows results in-quarter.

Brand shows up like hopefully 12 plus months later. So the million dollars that I spend it now is not going to be realized for in quarter. And, whether this is right or wrong, we could have a whole show around this conversations, but CFOs and finance teams fund what they can see and what they can measure.

So budgets tend to drift towards things that they can do that. And brand is, although there are very good metrics that we can measure it, it tends to be harder to have that conversation. And so you end up with for, what I think is the classic B2B marketing budget that’s 80% demand gen, 20% brand.

But if you go into like a more of a B2C brand, that balance is very different. You’d ask Pepsi and Coke that question, I think you’d find it’s, almost 50/50 at this point.

Jeff White: Maybe even more. Brand? That kind of conversation is like religion.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Michael, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think we could probably go on for another an hour at this stage, but I wonder what parting advice you might have as we try to bring the show to a close. Lots of marketers out there more junior in their career than we are, as you mentioned earlier about getting close to that 51 number that I mentioned.

Let’s impart some advice on those folks before we call it a day.

Michael Barber: Yeah, I’ll give you a lesson that I learned I think it was day two. My first boss out of college was Jay Baer, a prolific thinker and speaker in what was the early dotcom days and and certainly in, in the digital marketing realm. And he said, “You better always be learning, because if you ain’t learning, you’re dying.”

And I would say that’s probably the best advice that’s served me, whether at any part of my career, but especially in the early components is like, just because you’ve walked away from a classroom, whether that is a digital classroom or a physical classroom, doesn’t mean you, you should stop learning.

And I think that’s what served my career so well is getting into the nitty-gritty of the work, understanding the tools, ’cause I think it gives me permission as a, as both a practitioner and a leader to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t.

Carman Pirie: Michael, a pleasure. Thank you for joining the Kula Ring.

Michael Barber: It was my honor. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Jeff White: Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks.