B-to-B Insights : Rational vs. Emotional

Are businesspeople devoid of emotion when making buying decisions?

An example of a hybrid market is SOHOs—small business/home offices. These are, for the most part, self-employed people working at home or in small rented offices. Typically they work alone, while others have small staffs.

Technically, because they are business owners, selling to SOHOs is B-to-B marketing. But SOHOs often behave more like individual consumers than corporate executives, engineers or IT professionals.

For a corporate middle manager, the purchase of an expensive color digital printer may be a largely dispassionate decision: one of the tasks she must contend with that week.

The SOHO is more likely to agonize over this purchase decision. The expense of the equipment is much more of an emotional issue, because it’s coming out of the SOHO’s pocket. In addition, the SOHO may cultivate a personal excitement from this purchase (having coveted but never owned office equipment this high-tech or costly before) that the corporate employee does not feel.

Farmers are another hybrid market. The family farm is a farmer’s legacy and livelihood, and there are few issues more emotionally charged than keeping it and passing it on to the children. Yet, a farm is a business, and therefore, farmers are, strictly speaking, a B-to-B and not a consumer market.

More Than Meets the Eye
I am unaware of any authoritative study on whether B-to-B marketing (and marketing to hybrid markets that exhibit some B-to-B characteristics) works better when it is reduced to the bare essential facts or written on a personal and emotional level. I can only relate what I have found during my three decades as a B-to-B copywriter. Here is what I believe works in B-to-B copy as a rule:

• B-to-B prospects are far less dispassionate about their jobs and industries than often is imagined.
• The business prospect buys not only for his company, but for his own personal benefit, and the two are sometimes at odds. Often a prospect will specify a product if he believes it personally will make his life easier or his employment more secure.
• While B-to-B prospects can be engaged and sold emotionally, once that engagement takes place, they require much more rational evidence to support their buying decisions than consumers.

Melding Rational With Emotional
The answer to our question, “Are B-to-B prospects devoid of emotion?” is decidedly “no.” On the contrary, and despite what they may say, much of B-to-B buying is motivated by emotional reasons rather than logical facts.

However, the emotion in B-to-B marketing typically comes in the front end of the sale, which involves getting attention and engagement. This is the place in the B-to-B sales cycle where emotion-driven consumer advertising techniques maximize marketing effectiveness. An example is the current TV campaign for Macintosh versus Microsoft, where Apple computers are positioned as cooler, friendlier and problem-free.

Once emotion hooks the B-to-B prospect, and he begins a serious evaluation of your product, logic and intellect take over. He gradually shifts from an emotional buyer (though residue of his emotional reaction to your marketing stays with him throughout the sales cycle) and increasingly toward a rational mode of decision making.

At this stage, the prospect is performing due diligence. He has to make sure the product can perform the functions required, fits the application’s requirements, is compatible with his current infrastructure, has the proper specifications and can handle the buyer’s application. Here is where traditional, informational, fact-based, content-rich B-to-B marketing—data sheets, brochures, white papers, podcasts and webinars—are most useful to buyers, because they contain answers to the buyer’s due-diligence research questions.

Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books including “The White Paper Marketing Handbook” (Racom). You can find him on the Web at www.bly.com, e-mail him at rwbly@bly.com or phone (201) 385-1220.

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