Big Ideas 2014: B2B Marketing Will Look More Like Lego

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers pick one big idea that will shape 2014. See all the ideas here.

We love consumer brands and the feelings and moments they make possible in our lives. But how often do you see such devotion to a B2B brand? It's very rare—even though brands like GE, SAP, and IBM make our lives and businesses run better everyday. As we close the year at Wolff Olins, we're hyper aware of a big cultural shift that's blurring the lines between how B2B and B2C brands were traditionally supposed to behave. More people—those inside organizations and those operating on their own—are finding ways to create, adapt and build. And 2014 will demand that companies (both B2C and B) find new ways to give people a platform to make and share their ideas.

While most business-to-business brand analysis focuses on what B2B brands say and the marketing messages they put out, most perceptions of B2B brands are truly based on people's experiences of them, not the messages they see. In the coming year, B2B brands have a huge opportunity to take on a new role—enabling people to experiment with their future. And that's as much a challenge for marketers as it is for those developing products.

The future is unknowable, but B2B companies can help people make some damn good guesses! These are businesses powered by data, scale, and amazing predictive capacity. Businesses that play with scenarios everyday.

While B2B brand building keeps evolving, it’s possible to simplify this complex story into three shifts—each increasingly exciting.

SHIFT 1: Scale and strength > “what people do with us”
For a while, we've seen a big shift in business-to-business brands moving from talking about their scale and strength to how they partner with businesses and what they actually help them to do.

These are the baseline behaviors of good B2B marketing, but they’re still mainly based on broadcast-style communications.

Bragging about the famous clients that run brilliantly on your work, via advertising like this.

Letting your clients talk about the impact your work has on their users, like SAP has done delightfully below.

Having your people talk about big studies and surveys you've conducted and sharing those results via hangout (one of GE's favorite strategies).

Showing off design thinking through whiteboarding sessions or animated pieces—though it's tough to make these as exciting as they sound.

SHIFT 2: What businesses do with us > “what we share”

But the more highly evolved business-to-business brands are starting to think of marketing as social innovation.

Telling stories about what it’s like to work on world challenges, with really clever people, outside of their organization. The award-winning short films from GE Focus Forward are some of our favorite examples.

Running innovation labs that people can submit ideas to, and have them made real—like SAP's done with Idea Place.

Being super social, with a whole lot of views about stuff. Though, word to the wise: this takes a very strong brand, like IBM, to pull off. And volume does not necessarily equal quality.

SHIFT 3: What we share > “What can you imagine?”

Over 90% of B2B companies are betting on content marketing. The most pressing issues these companies have are producing enough content—and the kind that engages. And there are some stars: Corning Inc. showed a vision of the future that got people excited. Intel has done a great job of showcasing the creativity of experts. But what's next?

We believe that B2B will shift to P2P—and marketing is where the revolution will start.

In 2014, we’re betting on the brands borrowing strategies from outside of B2B to craft relationships that put individuals in the driving seat. Opening their worlds to people and giving them a giant sandbox to play in — a super toolkit to build with. Experiences that are more like Lego and Grand Theft Auto than traditional content marketing.

Building a sandbox to play in

This moment demands that B2B businesses stop thinking of their brands as a complete, finished package, but rather a powerful collaboration with people. Learn form Masashi Kawamura and his creative lab PARTY, who have found incredible ways to engage people in experiences that are ever-evolving, never quite finished. Below, PARTY’s “Music Video Game” invites audiences to actually make the “video” as they watch it. While in the game, you can tweet messages that become a part of the piece, animated in line with video’s song.

Imagine the type of interactions and content massive technology providers could create harnessing big data or healthcare exchange through an interactive medium like this.

Learn to listen hard

We will soon be in a world where people can broadcast what they want and watch the market run to them. Think about intent casting—the phenomenon where any customer can now say, for example, ‘I need a new x with me today’, advertise that need and select the best response. Watch Doc Searls talking to the Interactive Advertising Bureau about the implications of intent casting.

This finally turns the market on its head. B2B should think less about CRM and more about how they can enable VRM. We see a role for them to provide better tools for people to shout exactly what they need – and be listening when they call.

Imagine what you could do in your business, on the customer’s side, to help them advertise their need? Imagine how knowing that information in aggregate, and listening and processing it new ways, could affect not just the marketing of your business, but the very products you offer?

Turning over the tools

Ultimately B2B brands will have to give some of the reigns over to users, to build the futurewith them not just for them. Look at BitTorrent and its recent BitTorrent Bundles. They're stepping us into a future where any creator is able directly distribute content—from music to software—to millions. They're giving people the tools to hack around and make each file more valuable each time its shared. They're even encouraging people to hack with their own applications. These artist experiments are just the start. If we believe these open source and people powered protocols will prevail, we will be in a world of user generated storefronts, all engaging P2P not B2B.

Want to go even more radical? Learn from projects like the Tent.io, a web protocol for personal data and communications that opens a world of possibilities to developers—it’s a scalable API that can do anything a developer asks for. The implications of this approach to making are frankly unlimited—let your users surprise you with their ingenuity.

Imagine if the world's biggest companies enabled all of us—their customers—to become "developers” of the future?