What’s the difference between marketing an engineering brand and a consumer brand?

The principles are the same. Strategic principles are the same. You do the same types of research, use the same models, and put your marketing plan into the same format. You still need a clear brand proposition, know what your objectives are, know who you’re targeting, understand your customers, your competitors and the general environment. You have to know what’s different about you compared to competitors and alternative products and services.

However, putting this into practice isn’t quite as simple as it sounds, and there are some key differences too.

Getting the message right

Engineering companies tend to have smaller budgets and are usually more conservative in their branding and messaging than B2C companies. They often overwhelm their customers with information and struggle to translate technical information into something simple and engaging.

There’s a tendency to start with features rather than the benefit for the customer, what the technical spec is, rather than what the customer’s issues are and how you help solve them. That’s how you get their interest to start off with. It takes a special skill set to do that translation. Consumer brands already understand this and are mostly pretty good at this. They understand the customer’s problems and how they fit.

Don’t ignore emotion

Consumer brands are much better at invoking emotion. Just because a product is very technical and well-engineered doesn’t mean emotion doesn’t come into play. We’re all humans. Everyone involved in the buying process is human with emotions.

It may not be invoking excitement or a need to keep up with the Joneses. However, you should be invoking confidence or pride in their role. You might need to invoke concern that they’re doing something wrong, that they’re not delivering the best value for their bosses, that they’re not doing the best for their company, and hope that there is a better way of doing things.

You don’t produce a product or service just because it’s clever. You do it because it helps your customers.

Remember, non-technical people are in the buying process

There are non-technical people in the buying process. That’s always the case in consumer products. Some of them are very clever, too, but no one cares how their dishwasher works. They just care that it cleans their dishes.

There’ll be people in the buying process who don’t care how your product actually works, or the specific features it has. They care about how it will help them. A sustainability manager will care about how it saves them energy; reduces the number of chemicals they need to use. The health and safety manager will care about how your product is safe and improves safety on their site. The operations manager will care about downtime, including the cost of products not going out. A CFO will care about overall value, cost-benefit ratios. They care about how it helps them in their business role. They don’t necessarily need to know all of the engineering details up front. It doesn’t mean that information shouldn’t be available somewhere down the line, but that shouldn’t be the first piece of information they see.

Even if the decision-makers are purely technical people, they are very busy and bombarded with messages every single day. Why should they look at the technical information that you have?

Standing out is essential for engineering brands

Another issue that engineering brands struggle with compared to consumer brands is standing out. Have you ever gone to an exhibition and found that each engineering company blends into the next?

Their products and services may be differentiated, but that doesn’t mean they are getting noticed. Consumer brands are much better at making sure their colours are different. They use different ways to describe themselves. They know distinctiveness (looking and sounding different) is just as important as differentiation. Of course, differentiation (how you’re different from your competitors) is important, but so is standing out against your competitors.

Historically, engineering brands have tended to use the same shades of the same colours; the same shade of blue is most common, but the same shade of red also appears again and again.

The other area where engineering brands aren’t standing out is the messaging, especially tag lines. They often use the same way to describe themselves, often very bland, meaningless taglines like “safety first” or “best in innovation in the industry”. Something that doesn’t say anything about what they actually do. Sometimes you’ll even see the exact same tagline used for multiple brands. Sometimes those are businesses that don’t do anything even remotely in common. Engineering companies tend to blend in with all other engineering companies, not just the competition.

Senior management doesn’t always value marketing

The difficulty with engineering companies is that, all too often, the senior management team does not value marketing as it should. They may have an internal marketing team, they may not. When they do have a marketing team, they often don’t provide the resources they need, and they’re even expected to do everything in-house themselves, serving as a jack of all trades and a master of none. A good marketing strategist can create the right communications mix for you and achieve the best value and ROI by working with agencies

For many other engineering businesses, marketing just sits under the responsibility of sales. Salespeople are not marketers. Salespeople also have a tendency to focus on leads and the sales funnel, short-term marketing, not long-term marketing.

Long-term and short-term marketing both matter

Consumer brands understand that the long-term is just as important as the short-term. That’s why they invest in brand awareness activities such as advertising and PR. This is for two reasons.

• A brand being front of mind drops off after a while. Many years ago, Heinz made the mistake of thinking that because the brand was so well known, they didn’t need to do any brand awareness activity. Their sales declined over time, and the business’s value dropped by 20% in just a few years.
• Customers aren’t always in need of your product, but you want them to purchase yours when they are. In B2C, this is particularly true of larger purchases such as cars. For most engineering businesses, this is the case for all of their products and services.

In B2B, it’s a rough rule of thumb (very rough rule of thumb), you need to put 50% of your resources into long-term objectives and 50% of your resources into short-term objectives. Engineering businesses often do one or the other, usually the short-term, when they need to be thinking about both. That means you need SMART objectives, both short and long-term, at both the business level and marketing level.

Multiple messages are often needed

Engineering products are often very complex and solve many problems for customers, so it sometimes takes longer to explain them. That sometimes means that multiple messages need to go to different types of customers or different roles, because they care about different things. It’s rarely the case in consumer goods, which makes it easier.

Which brings me on to the next thing. The biggest difference between consumer goods and engineering businesses is that there’s rarely one decision-maker or influencer (by “influencer,” I mean someone who influences your customers’ decision to buy your product; I’m not talking about the Kardashians). It’s a much more complex sale than a consumer product, which means that marketing is more complex. You still need to make each piece of front-end communication that someone receives as simple as possible, which presents a challenge.

The customer journey is more complex

Another thing that’s different in engineering is that you are more likely to have direct communication with your customers. You know who they are. There are a limited number of companies that you can sell to, which in some ways makes it easier compared to business-to-consumer. It’s much easier to find your target audience. It’s much easier to define who they are and what they care about.

However, the customer journey is more complex because of the number of people involved and the different types of information they need at each touchpoint. Different companies have different processes, and different types of people will be the ultimate decision-makers. A customer journey for a consumer is more likely to be: they see an advert, they see it at the point of sale, they pick it up, put it in their trolley, and they buy it. Or they search for it online, and within a few clicks, the product is on its way.

In the consumer world, there is an element of needing more information the closer you get to purchase. Take Cadbury’s. You know they make chocolate because they do general brand brand awareness campaigns. Then they do individual product advertising, and you start to know the different types of products that they do. Then you get into the supermarket, you see the full range of products with information about the ingredients. Most consumers probably don’t look at the ingredients, but that information, that technical information, needs to be there before they purchase it.

That’s obviously a lot simpler compared to engineering, where the level of information required towards the end of purchase or after purchase is quite considerable, especially if it’s something that the customer is going to have to understand and maintain and maybe even install themselves. So that information needs to be there at the right stage of the customer journey.

Post-purchase is crucial

Another thing that’s different compared to consumer marketing is post-purchase information. For the vast majority of consumer goods, once someone’s purchased it, they never think about it again. They don’t look more closely at the information. They’ve done their research, as much research as someone’s going to do, and they’re happy. The post-purchase part of the customer journey is simply trying to get them to become a loyal customer and repeatedly buy that same product. For many engineering companies, that’s not the case.

For an engineering company, post-purchase, you’re more likely to be thinking about cross-selling. You’re considering getting case studies and customer testimonials. You want them to feel like they’ve made the right decision. Research shows that in extremely technical consumer purchases where there’s a lot of money involved, such as a car, it’s the one consumer industry where more research happens after they’ve purchased the vehicle than before, which may seem surprising.

It’s very similar in engineering, where there’s likely to have been a very large purchase. Your customers have invested an awful lot of money, and they need to feel confident that they have made the right decision, that you are going to be there for them. They’re more likely to recommend you, and they’re more likely to purchase from you again. On an individual level, as they move on to another company that has the same problems that your product will solve, they’re going to come to you.

So you need to think about that part of the process. Make sure that you think about how they feel after they’ve made the purchase, that you give them the right training, you give them the right support. You’re helpful in terms of maintenance or with parts, or whatever it is you do, even if, in some cases, you charge for the training or you build that into your price and you list it separately as a compulsory part of the process.

In conclusion, while the principles of marketing an engineering brand is the same as B2C, and the engineering world can certainly learn a lot from the consumer world, there are many complexities that make it much harder to get it right.

If you need help marketing your complex engineering products and services, B2Be Different’s combined strategy and creative expertise gives you the tools to be braver, identify and embrace opportunity, and grow your business. Get in touch via the contact form on our website.

Author: Samantha Tonge, Co-Founder B2Be Different