Unfortunately, B2B brands’ widespread success at demonstrating business value has limitations. Although each brand can claim impressive business outcomes, so too can that brand’s competitors. In fact, business value perceptions hardly vary at all between brands, either within an industry or even across industries according to a well established Google report. The reality is that buyers perceive little difference between the business value various suppliers can offer.
Despite our attempts to make purely rational decisions, we are primarily driven by
emotional motivations.Think with Google
This lack of perceived differentiation has dramatic effects on willingness to pay a premium. Only about 14% of customers perceive a real difference in a supplier’s offerings and value the difference enough to be willing to pay for it.
In summary, business value is just table stakes. It gets suppliers into a buyer’s consideration set, but doesn’t make them stand out within that set of competitors.
This is referred to as the “one of three” problem. As customers do their own research, they conclude that the top three leaders in an industry all deliver business value and are acceptable options. This leads to the inevitable price competition where customers ultimately select the supplier willing to offer the lowest price.
Or, if the tight rally but slightly different aspects of a solution confuses the decision makers, the whole project is put on hold.
By adding inspirational, personal values to the game, brands can gain sympathy at an early stage of the purchase journey, and assist in rationalizing that good feeling along the way.
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