It is Brighton and Hove Albion’s brilliant Italian coach, Roberto de Zerbi, that B2B Marketing CEO Richard O’Connor name-checks when he talks about the lessons he learned in his own rather stellar career. De Zerbi has brought the football club from the brink of extinction to the Premier League – and Europe. The Italian’s game plan is simple: Everything every player does on the pitch is designed to score a goal. In a business, everybody’s role is to help that business grow, Richard says in a wide-ranging conversation about why he loves the business-to-business sphere, on not having all the answers, and community intelligence.
When two university friends launched a tiny publication called B2B Marketing from a South London bedroom in 2004, it was probably the only magazine at the time aimed at marketing chiefs who target a business audience.
The very concept of business-to-business or B2B marketing was still a “weird adjunct” to business-to-consumer marketing, says Richard O’Connor, chief executive officer of B2B Marketing, the eponymous international company that grew out of that single magazine.
“B2B marketing specialism did exist, but it had no definition,” says Richard. “It had no home, no champion.”
But in the nearly twenty years since, B2B marketing has grown into “an extraordinarily sophisticated industry”, as Richard puts it, “five times as big as B2C, depending on which stats you look at”. (Statista valued the global B2B e-commerce market at US$17.9 trillion in 2021, over five times that of the B2C market, and Forrester forecasted the United States market alone to exceed US$3 trillion by 2027.)
While the magazine B2B Marketing no longer exists, the company has added digital reports, training, events, webinars, a podcast, roundtables and awards to its portfolio.
The fact that the business has the same name as the industry may be slightly confusing, but Richard says it is “no coincidence”.
“Over 10, 15 years, they gradually built a following, gave people a home, started talking about issues that were unique to B2B marketers and not just marketing in the broadest sense.”
Then, in 2020, the Covid 19 pandemic hit. Soon after, the company launched its flagship product Propolis – a “global community for B2B marketing leaders” offering online intelligence, expertise, and solutions. It was a virtual hub to help marketing chiefs make informed, data-driven decisions in their day-to-day operations when meeting face-to-face was impossible.
“If we’re going to be completely honest, Propolis was an innovation driven out of a crisis,” Richard says. “We had closed the magazine. The bulk of our revenue was coming from face to face events, awards or conferences. So when the pandemic hit, it was a huge challenge.”
Generosity of spirit
At the beginning of 2022, Richard joined B2B Marketing as managing director – the first time anyone was appointed in the position since James Farmer and Joel Harrison started the business back in 2004.
Richard had worked for consumer and B2B media businesses across markets, running The Independent’s Creative Solutions team, establishing UBM’s client solutions teams, and leading a global transformation.
But it is B2B that he keeps returning to.
“There are a plethora of clever people in business-to-business marketing who are not in the limelight and do not get the exposure. They are just ingenious, clever people who have been working away, helping to grow the global economy through the growth of their own businesses,” he says.
“There is an absolute generosity of spirit within B2B marketing, a willingness to share and learn and help others get better, and I think that is distinct from B2C. There is a lot less ego in B2B, and particularly in B2B marketing, because people get on with the job. They have always been driving growth and driving revenue.”
Richard was brought in partly to help the company keep pace in the fast-changing environment, an evolution he warns is just going to get faster.
“In B2B marketing and B2B sales and even more broadly, it’s almost out of control of the organisation. The buyer is changing, and their behaviour is different. It has never been more important to step into our buyer’s shoes.
“What is their world? What other processes are they going through? Who else needs to be involved?
“The more we look at it insularly, navel-gazing, the further behind we get. The industry is evolving because buyers are evolving. The technology and infrastructure is changing rapidly. So, keeping up is really at the core of business.”
An expert community and safe spaces
After the pandemic, the world has opened up again. But the workplace has changed. How do pandemic innovations stand up to this reality? And how do those innovations then adapt to change?
Propolis, for one, seems to be doing just fine. It was awarded “Innovation of the Year” at the 2023 PPA Awards, and the judges remarked on its ability to “create pivotal change within the B2B Marketing brand by turning challenges into opportunities”.
Richard says their clients had initially made it clear they still wanted access to expertise in networking and peer-to-peer learning during the pandemic. They wanted to talk, challenge each other and offer help in a place where they could do it whenever they liked.
After the pandemic, these needs still exist, albeit in a changed format. The Propolis offering has adapted accordingly.
“We’ve integrated Propolis more meaningfully and increasingly with our physical events. We have evolved from a legacy publishing business to a community intelligence business. That is the industry market we have defined,” Richard explains.
Community intelligence is about creating empirical research and insight within Propolis, which then surfaces at events. After the events, the conversation continues within Propolis.
The point is that people want to meet in person, but continue the conversation afterwards online. And people in the online community want to come to events.
“So there’s this lovely integration and circularity,” Richard says.
“We provide the critical decision-making data, intelligence benchmarks, and then development, opinions, research. So, it’s the strategic intelligence to drive change. Then we have expertise. It’s an expert community in the sense that we have our own experts, all marketing practitioners, all people who’ve been B2B marketers, who’ve run agencies, who now work within Propolis to provide what I would call arm’s length advisory.”
But it’s also a space for peers to talk to somebody with the same challenges and to share their knowledge. “I think it is liberating for people to know they are not facing these issues alone.”
Richard O’Connor’s trend watch
While the focus is on fast-changing technology and infrastructure, brand purpose is still crucial.
People’s attitude to brands have evolved, Richard says, and people increasingly become emotionally attached to a brand around its purpose.
It’s not about greenwashing, for example, but about a belief in what a brand stands for and the core values of the organisation. Organisations are questioned on why they are growing and what they are giving back to customers.
The distinction between B2B and B2C marketing is blurring, with some of the biggest B2B brands now producing consumer-like ads and formats on channels like the Super Bowl.
Artificial intelligence, Richard says, is truly transformational for B2B marketers.
“I would go as far as to say, it will have the same impact over time as the Internet itself.
“There are people who are fearful of it but I think the companies that will grow in the future and succeed are those that harness AI and get the best out of AI.”
There is no doubt that AI will cost jobs, Richard warns. But new jobs will be created and humans will focus on “the bits only humans can do”. The companies that are getting the most out of AI, are the most creative.
“I think it is absolutely not something to be feared. It’s something every organisation should embrace. Make the most of it, and if you’re not thinking about how to use AI, you’re already behind.”
Sales and marketing will coalesce. Sales enablement is not the right phrase, Richard says. It is all about buyer enablement, as buyers are more empowered and informed.
The question is therefore how to make the buyer experience better: The distinction between sales and marketing does not help the buyer and the best organisations will focus on the buyer journey rather than internal processes and systems and alignment.
Crucially, more data and more intelligence will be at the fore – the ability to use large data sets, and take the intelligence and insights from those data sets to open up potential new customer pools or micro markets that you didn’t know existed.
The best companies, Richard says, will be those that have data scientists who can translate data into strategy.
Meet Richard at Mx3 Barcelona, where he will be part of our speaker line-up. Read more and sign up at mx3barcelona.com.
*Watch Richard’s fascinating take on the three most important lessons he has learned in the industry below.
** Adri Kotze has been a journalist for as long as she can remember, including stints as a features writer, political journalist, investigative reporter and commissioning editor. She now writes about all things media and publishing. Get in touch at adri@mediamakersmeet.com or on LinkedIn.
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