Marketing

Utilitarianism Marketing: Why B2B Marketers Have to Start Giving to Get

February 26, 2014

Listen up B2B marketers, innovative digital marketer and social media expert Ekaterina Walter has a new challenge for you — either make your marketing actually useful to your customers or prepare to get left in the dust.

In December 2012, Ekaterina Walter was doing what many people do in the days leading up to Christmas — scrambling to find the perfect gifts for her family.
Specifically, Walter, a renowned marketer, speaker, and best-selling author who is widely credited with pioneering Intel’s social media strategy, had no idea what to buy her husband.
“I was starting to freak out about it,” Walter remembers. “I’m not the type to just buy something random. I wanted it to be something he’d really love.”
So, the social media pro turned to a medium she knew was capable of solving her problem — Twitter.
Among a handful of tweets Walter sent out was one to gear and clothing retailer REI, asking the company what its best gift suggestion was for that holiday season. Within an hour, REI responded — but not just with a tweet. The company also recorded a custom video for Walter that featured an REI employee telling her why the GoPro Hero 3 video camera was the perfect choice.


“The speed of their response was impressive, but I was more blown away by the relevance and personalization,” Walter says. “It was such a cool, innovative way to approach customer interactions.”
In total, REI shot about 80 of those customized videos in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and that strategy paid off in a big way. According to Walter, the campaign doubled traffic to REI’s website during the holidays.

The Power of Utilitarianism Marketing (and Why It’s Not Just for B2C Companies)

Ekaterina Walter

“Marketing is all about thinking from a P2P — Person-to-Person — perspective. How can you make the life of the person you’re interacting with easier or more effective? What can you add that’s truly of value to them? From that point of view, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling software or cereal.”

Ekaterina Walter

 
 
Walter says REI’s campaign is one great example of utilitarianism marketing — a concept that’s gained momentum lately thanks to books written by marketing experts Mitch Joel and Jay Baer in 2013.
At a high level, Walter says utilitarianism marketing is relatively simple: “It’s about providing a valuable service to customers and prospects, whether they ever buy something from your company or not,” Walter explains. “It’s all about being selfless and showing customers you genuinely care about building a relationship, rather than making them feel like you’re just shoving another call-to-action down their throat.”
Essentially, utilitarianism forces marketers to focus on delivering resources that give buyers what they want and need.
While that sounds simple enough, the problem is that it goes against the way most marketers are programmed.
“Typically, when we allocate budget to a marketing campaign or tactic, marketers feel compelled to make sure their branding is slapped all over it,” says Walter. “Even when we’re trying to deliver something helpful or useful, the temptation is to somehow turn the spotlight back on us — our products, our services, or the next step we want customers to take.”
Utilitarianism marketing encourages marketers to take a different approach — and it’s not a tactic that’s only applicable to consumer companies.
Take IBM, which launched a “Smarter Cities” marketing campaign in 2013 that transformed traditional billboard advertisements into functional items — benches, ramps, and umbrella-like shelters — that made city dwellers’ lives simpler.
“People get so hung up on whether a tactic is appropriate for B2B or B2C, but I think marketing is all about thinking from a P2P — Person-to-Person — perspective,” Walter argues. “How can you make the life of the person you’re interacting with easier or more effective? What can you add that’s truly of value to them? From that point of view, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling software or cereal. If you work for a B2B company, you’re still marketing to people, and those people will always have wants and needs that you can address.”

3 Tips for Putting Utilitarianism Marketing into Practice

While there are numerous ways utilitarianism marketing can be applied, Walter says there are a three key things — what she calls “mindset changes” — marketers must grasp before they get started with it.

oneIdentify what your customers really need to be successful

There’s a big difference between what people want and what they need, Walter points out. Marketers should be focused on the latter. For B2B companies, this could manifest itself in your business hosting a day of learning where you bring in experts to teach customers how to better connect with their market or leverage new technology.

twoPut services first and marketing second

While branding is still an important element of the marketing function, Walter says utilitarianism is all about providing services that explicitly help your customers, not your brand. A good example of this is Charmin’s SitorSquat app — a crowdsourced service that helps users find clean (and well stocked) public restrooms anywhere in the country. Charmin’s branding is subtle and the company doesn’t use the app as a vehicle for marketing or selling its products, but it’s long-term impact on sales could be significant.

threeThink long-term instead of focusing on instant ROI

Walter says the goal of utilitarianism marketing is to generate customer loyalty and advocacy long-term, not one-off sales short-term. So, rather than spending all of your time trying to find and reach new customers (who you are not even sure will buy from you), Walter recommends putting extra effort into cultivating your existing communities and customers. By identifying and engaging with current advocates and passionate evangelists who can ignite movements around your brand, you can ultimately leverage their help in extending your reach farther and more effectively than you could on your own. In turn, you will begin organically bringing in new customers, as well.
Of course, the $20,000 question for expansion-stage businesses is whether utilitarianism marketing is truly scalable, or implementable when a company’s focus is building a brand, acquiring more leads, and generating more revenue in the short-term.
“Is it scalable? Heck no,” Walter admits. “Caring is never scalable, but it’s what will help you build a better, stronger brand. REI didn’t try to create 100,000 videos for every customer it had. It focused on providing as much value to as many customers as it could, and that effort was amplified. Websites wrote about it and we’re still talking about it. That’s pretty incredible impact for a relatively small campaign.”

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Photo by: Tom Fahy

Global Evangelist

After spending over 10 years as an integrated marketer and social media leader at Intel and Accenture, she was a co-founder and CMO of BRANDERATI (acquired by Sprinklr in 2014). She is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "Think Like Zuck" and "The Power of Visual Storytelling." While not enjoying fashion and a good book, she also maintains a very popular blog called <a href="http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/">Building Social Bridges</a> and is a member of Intel’s prestigious Social Media Center of Excellence. Currently she is the Global Evangelist at <a href="https://www.sprinklr.com/">Sprinklr</a>.