This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

An aside about B2B marketing
B2B stands for business to business—when a business sells something to
another one.
It’s a third or more of many markets. And the marketing of B2B is no
different.
It seems complicated, something completely separate. Huge numbers,
RFPs, a focus on meeting spec, a price war, long sales cycles, and no fun at
all.

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But it’s simpler than that.
Consider the growth of LEED certification in the United States. The
Green Building Council has a set of efficiency standards that buildings (one
of the most expensive items in the world) must meet. When they first
launched, only two buildings a day were submitted for certification.
These were the early adopters—architects and builders who wanted
something new to talk about.
At that rate, it would have taken a hundred years to hit the numbers they
hit after just twelve.
What happened? Just before the housing crisis hit, the number of
certifications leapt forward, and it kept going. Why?
Think about it from the worldview of the real estate developer. He or she
is about to spend a highly leveraged sum of money to build a building, a
building for rent or eventual resale.
If just a few people insist on the LEED certification in a building they
rent or buy, it’s enough to confer status on people who have one of those

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buildings. And if you skimped when creating the building, you’d have to
deal with the regret and fear you’d face if you ended up with a building
seen by some as defective.
And so there’s a race to the top.
Each developer has a narrative, and that narrative leads to the selfish (but
ultimately positive) decision to get certified.
The one question that every business buyer asks herself is, “What will I
tell my boss?”
You’re marketing the answer to that question: “If you choose this, you
can tell your board/investors/boss that you . . .”
The marketer who is out of ideas or energy finishes that sentence with,
“. . . bought the cheapest one.”
For the rest of us, there’s the opportunity to finish that sentence with a
narrative about status, fear, affiliation, belonging, dominion, safety,
commitment, insight, or any of the other emotions we’ve discussed.

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