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How to Add Creativity and Value to B2B Marketing
September 21, 2022 B2B Marketing Brand Leadership Business Growth Career Growth Creative Agency Design Leadership Mentorship
Guest Speaker

Eric Fulwiler

Co-founder and CEO, Rival

Eric Fulwiler is an entrepreneur who builds businesses through modern marketing and management practices. Over the last 15 years he’s been lucky enough to help build some of the biggest brands in the world, from billion-dollar start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Eric spent 10 years in the agency world and was the MD of EMEA for VaynerMedia, which he built to 100 people in 4 years working directly for Gary Vaynerchuk. For the last three years he was CMO of 11:FS, a global fintech consultancy, where he built marketing into a £1M revenue line for the business. He is now a co-founder and CEO of Rival, a marketing consultancy that builds challenger brands, strategies, and teams to disrupt categories.

Creativity drives business.

If marketing is the growth engine of business and creativity is the core of marketing, the real tool for propelling business forward is creative work. Even in B2B.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Eric Fulwiler, Co-founder and CEO of Rival, discusses why re-envisioning creative’s role, strategy, and influence in the B2B space can be the game-changer companies need for long-term success.

Join now to learn more about how to make creativity the secret sauce of building your brand.

Watch this episode to discover:

  • Where to push the envelope for audience attention
  • What kind of company culture to build around marketing
  • Why adding value should be your creative focus
  • How to think about brand differentiation
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mentioned in this show:
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Adam Morgan
Creative Leader and RCL Host
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The Stoke Group
Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency
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RCL Episode Season 3, Episode 9
How to add creativity and value to B2B marketing — with Eric Fulwiler
Co-founder and CEO, Rival

 

Transcript

Adam Morgan:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Real Creative Leadership. We’re very excited to have you listening in with us and chatting with us. We have an awesome guest today. His name is Eric Fulwiler. He is the CEO of Rival and an ex-CMO, but I’m not going to go through his whole lineage. I’m going to give him a chance to tell us where he is from, but we’ve had some really interesting conversations before we recorded this. And I’m really excited to dig into this topic.

Today’s topic is how can we make B2B more creative? There’s certainly a history around B2B, and we’re going to talk through that and where it’s been and where we hope things will be going. But anyhow, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Let me just pass it over to Eric here for a minute. And just tell us, Eric, a little bit about an introduction of yourself, your career, your background, how you’ve gotten into all of this and how it relates to creativity marketing.

Eric Fulwiler:

Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. And second of all, I’m really looking forward to this conversation since the moment you reached out. So yeah, I’m really excited to hear your perspective on what we’re going to talk about as well. And it definitely overlaps with my experience and the work we do here at Rival and a lot of the things that I’m passionate about in the marketing and business world. So I’ll give a quick overview on me, just to not bore people. And then if you think any of that is more relevant, I’m happy to double click on it and go deeper.

But a quick background for me, so I fell into marketing, accidentally. Marketing chose me, I guess, in a way. I did not choose marketing. I actually went to music school originally. So maybe there’s some connection to the creative conversation here, but actually as a musician, I was going to be a jazz musician. I was much more about the science than the art, actually breaking down music and understanding the numerical and the data side of how you actually create something that resonates with someone.

But either way, I realized I did not want to try to make a career as a professional musician and I got into the nonprofit world. So I worked for the Clinton Foundation, HIV/AIDs Initiative in Latin America. And I was going to be in that world in government and public service. I got frustrated relatively early on. I think part of that was just being 22, 23 years old. And thinking that you should have more of an impact on the world than you do.

But either way, I was like, all right, well, how about I go into business, learn how to actually build organizations and teams that can change things. And then maybe at some point, come back to nonprofit and after you’ve done well, you can come back to doing good, that whole idea, which I’m still hopefully on the path to do.

I’ve never gotten a job that I’ve applied for. All of the jobs that I’ve had, have come from people that I know. And so this first job in marketing, which was basically a social media strategist for forbes.com, although it was not called that because there was no such thing as social media strategy back in the day. But I ended up sitting down with the CEO of forbes.com and he was like, “I think we need someone to figure out this social media thing. You’re young. Why don’t you come in and do it?” I was like, “All right, fine.”

And they put me, my title was Publisher/Recruiter, because that was the closest that they could get. So helping, working for a woman who was building out their network of bloggers essentially, and that’s how I fell into the world of web 2.0, digital marketing, advertising, all this stuff. And so from there, I met a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, who was a wine vlogger and was-

Adam Morgan:

 Maybe we’ve heard of him.

Eric Fulwiler:

And had just set up a company called Vayner Media, which was 15 people and a dog. Actually, there wasn’t even a dog. It was 15 people and a bunch of wine boxes in a conference room in Midtown Manhattan. And so I worked for him for seven years. And Vayner Media now, I mean, it’s got to be one of the biggest independent agencies in the world. And so that was a wild ride.

I worked at MullenLowe for a while as a head of digital type thing. So 10 years in the agency space, and then most recently before setting up Rival, I was the CMO of 11FS, which is a FinTech venture builder. So basically we built challenger banks around the world. And then I got back together with two people who were part of the leadership team with me at Vayner to co-found Rival late last year. I said it would be brief, I guess that wasn’t all that brief, but hopefully it was interesting. And I think at the very least, it’ll provide context on the rest of our conversation.

Adam Morgan:

Oh absolutely. Let me provide some of that context to our readers because I think this is critical. So you had asked me beforehand, who’s the audience of this podcast of Real Creative Leadership. And the natural instinct is, oh, it’s just creative people, writers, designers, videographers, people who are in the creative field. But you’re here for a very good reason because you think about your background being in music and everything, of course, of course that’s creative.

Even the scientific stuff, like my background, I was going to become a chemical engineer and that’s what I went to university for. But it’s like, you and I, when we start to look behind the curtain and see how things work in business, that we see the value of creativity, we see the value of emotions and those experiences and personal connections. So to me, that’s just a perfect example of context. The audience here is not just creative people. It’s anyone who believes that creativity can impact business and that good, deep, emotional, creative experiences as customer experiences, are what’s going to move the needle for business.

So, that is absolutely relevant. So anyone listening, whether you’re creative or you feel like you’re not a creative, we’re all creative. We just tell our stories in different ways with data and with graphs and with other things, maybe not art and paint and words, but it’s still all the same thing. So yeah, that’s the important part that I wanted to get out.

Eric Fulwiler:

It’s so funny that you ended up there with the end of that spiel because that’s exactly what I was thinking as you were talking, is so many people, myself included, would label themsleves as not creative. Particularly if you come up in advertising agencies, where there’s literally people whose title is and job is to, “be creative.” I think creativity, at the end of the day, is just about putting things together in new and different ways to deliver value for whoever the audience or the customer, whatever the end goal is, creativity is a means to an end of doing that. 

There’s not one way to do it. You don’t have to be the Don Draper, brilliant artist, sitting in a room, coming up with 11 ideas on a slide. There are many different ways to go about it. And so I actually hadn’t really thought about that before you brought it up, but I think that’s such a good point, that’s relevant to this whole conversation. Because even when you reached out, I was like, creativity, do I label myself creative? And I walked that around a little bit and I was like, I guess I do, but probably not in the typical sense, but there is no, or there shouldn’t be a typical way to think about be or do creativity. 

Adam Morgan:

No, not at all. In fact, as part of my book, when you even dig into the neuroscience of it all, really strategy and creativity and business strategy and marketing, it’s all the same function. It’s all the same thing that you’re doing in your brain, you’re just expressing it in different ways. So I absolutely believe that we’re all creative. And so the reason why this conversation is so appropriate is we have someone from a marketing CMO background and then someone who’s traditionally been, “in the creative department”, his whole life, talking about how to make B2B more creative. And I think that’s totally valid.

So let’s get that conversation started. I would love to hear from you. Let’s start with tradition. Where is B2B traditionally located and talk through in terms of sales plays or how things are set up. And we want to talk through that because I think it’ll resonate with a lot of people who work in B2B companies of what the machine is set up right now at their current work.

Eric Fulwiler:

So my work in advertising agencies and definitely now in our work here at Rival, I am incredibly passionate about B2B marketing and B2B brands. And part of that is because of the way I’m going to answer this question. 

B2C, big consumer brands, get a lot of the love, attention, buzz when it comes to marketing because so many of them by default, because they’re trying to reach such a wide audience that they can actually talk to people individually, are very brand and marketing and creative led with how they grow.

B2B businesses, and for anybody listening in a B2B business, you know this, are typically not. They are typically sales-led. And so I think there’s that, of course it’s an overgeneralization, but I think on average and in general, B2B businesses are much more sales led than B2C businesses. And what that means in reality is at the very least, and I think, and I’ll come back to this in a second. I think you’re starting to see this change with the challenger brands in the B2C space, but the traditional incumbent B2B playbook for growth is to be sales-led.

And that means for marketing that at the very least, marketing is typically misunderstood, under invested, it is not realizing its full potential as a growth engine for the business. And at the worst, and I’ve seen this in many cases, marketing is actually subservient to sales and exists to support the sales function, if not roll up into it directly.

And the big thing for me is, I do not believe there is only one way to grow a business. However, I do believe that at the end of the day, sales and marketing play two related — but should be relatively interdependent — roles in growing a business. Sales is about converting demand and marketing is about generating demand. Another way of putting that is, sales is short-term cash flow marketing is long-term cash flow.

So if you are only sales-led, if you are prioritizing sales over marketing, it means I think you’re leaving long-term growth and long-term cashflow on the table. The passion piece for me and why we get so excited about doing work in the B2B space and working with trying to build challenger brands in that space, is what that means is that when it comes to marketing, if all these organizations have these marketing muscles that are not as big, strong, and toned as they could be, there’s a lot of opportunity out there. The bar is lower in many B2B industries to come in and actually take a more brand marketing, creative led approach to how to grow these businesses.

Adam Morgan:

That is absolutely true in what I’ve seen. There’s a certain style of B2B. When you go look at B2B websites or B2B content that’s sent out, and let’s be real, it’s part of that machine that you talked about from sales, it really is building all this content, sending it out there, getting your AQLS, flowing them through the funnel and getting them up to the final sales stage and then closing the deals and all that kind of stuff. So it’s like there’s a common language, there’s a common flow to all the work we do.

I think that some people feel like to be legitimate, and I’ve had people tell me this in my own company and past companies that it’s like, we have to look and smell and feel like a traditional B2B company with the same very corporatey-looking websites, or very bland, I guess, creative. It’s just very tried and true. So anyhow, changing up that. That’s like the short-term. The short-term is how do we focus quickly on these deals that are in front of us and not building when you’re talking about long-term brand or long-term reputation or content and creative that has a longer shelf life.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah. I’ll just jump in on that real quick, because I think that there is a reason that it all looks the same and that’s because everybody’s working from the same playbook. Those examples of marketing content, the reason that it all looks the same is because a lot of it’s driven by sales. How do we generate a lead? How do we get someone to buy this? How do we get someone to express their interest? Whatever that is. That’s the output that creates what in many cases is not creative, to put it politely, and sometimes boring and bland to put it more realistically.

So I actually think to what you said, and I know there’s a lot of organizations that kind of trend in this direction when it comes to marketing, but I think that if you’re especially intentionally putting out marketing that looks and feels like every other business, I honestly think that you’re missing out on opportunity, for sure, because differentiation is such a key part of building a brand that people care about.

I have a good friend who’s the chief strategy officer at Havas, and they put out this report every year. It’s a little bit more B2C focused than B2B called “Meaningful Brands.” Everybody should definitely go check it out. But what they find is the vast majority, I think it’s something like 75% of brands could disappear tomorrow and people wouldn’t care. I would imagine for B2B brands, that percentage is even higher. A lot of that comes down to they don’t mean anything to people, and they don’t mean anything to people because the material and the marketing and the communications and the activity, the story that they tell to the world does not have differentiation because it does not have creativity within it.

So sometimes when I was CMO and now with clients, one of the prompts that I’ll use with my teams or with our clients is if you took your logo off your marketing material, could it be a competitor’s? If the answer is yes, then I think you should be pushing it further. Chances are you can’t have it be every single thing you do. But I think that that’s the right north star. You should be pushing for more differentiation, not less.

Adam Morgan:

That is a tough one because I’ve heard that my whole career — pull the logo off. But I think it’s because sometimes that just ends up being just the look and feel discussion. But I think there’s a deeper discussion too around what is even the thing is standing for, what’s the heart of the message? What is the tone and the quality? There’s so many other elements that I think that you have to look at when you’re looking at differentiation beyond just, hey, do we have a unique style of photography?

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah, totally. I think part of it is the look and feel, but actually a little look and feel, a little design, a little creativity can go a long way, especially in the B2B space. The last business 11:FS where I was CMO, a lot of our differentiation was just that we spent a lot more time on design. We cared about design. We were a product business. So even when it came to our white papers or our webinars, we were trying to design a user experience. How many B2B marketing teams are intentionally trying to design a user experience for look and feel in the same way that they would a product?

So I think even the look and feel, I think that that is an opportunity and a bar that can be raised and can be pushed by B2B teams. But a lot of it has to do with the substance and the story of the business as well. 

We talk about four principles to what we believe here at Rival makes successful challenger brands. Being relevant to the needs of the audience you’re trying to solve. Being authentic in the sense that what you’re saying, you can actually back up as a business. Being differentiated, which is what we’re talking about. And then being dynamic, constantly learning, changing, evolving with the world around them.

So I really think that those four things, for marketers out there, I think you got to be thinking about how you can constantly, because it’s such a competitive world right now, even if you feel like you’re doing as much as you can right now, six months from now and nine months from now, 12 months from now, you can probably be doing more, but those four things, including differentiation in the middle of it, I think is so key to building a brand that hopefully people actually care about.

Adam Morgan:

I like the second and the fourth one a lot, especially authenticity and then also just being dynamic. By the way, in the show notes, we’ll put the link to that Havas report that you mentioned. But there’s another one that you and I talked about that I want to bring up because it relates to a lot of this, which is the B2B Marketing Institute has put out some great work around this whole topic of attention and what you’re really trying to sell. A part of that that they talked about, it’s pretty controversial, is this idea of it’s not so much all about your brand loyalty. It’s not about all these other elements that you’re building.

You’re really just trying to use elements and logos and look and feel and all these things to put up a good kind of personality that people will connect with and then just feel like they’re meeting someone. Just as you go to a cocktail party, the person you want to be around is someone who’s kind of oozing a good personality or that dynamic thing that you talked about and the authenticity thing that you talked about. 

So it’s not even so much of we get so worried in the depth of the deeper brand terms and jargon, but it’s really just like… You just got to be a really nice person and be there in their face all the time, right? I think that’s an interesting part that relates back to your earlier comment.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah. Agreed.

Adam Morgan:

Well, let’s talk about this then. So we talked about long-term and short-term. We talked about long-term being more branding and short-term being more sales. But what is the right balance of all of that? Let’s walk through that a little bit of when we’re building a more creative B2B brand, what are the actual activities that you’re recommending that we need to do beyond just have good design and good look and feel? Is it just that, it’s doing all the same different types of articles and content and videos and pull type of content that really has… Or is it more the discussion around the value of what it brings versus just repeating buzzwords?

I’d love to just dig into what makes good creative for B2B and then also what’s the right balance of all of that. Certainly, you’re going to have to have your funnel and your AQLs and all of that, but how much should we focus on this creative stuff versus just also the nuts and bolts that are going to keep the machine moving?

Eric Fulwiler:

So I believe that, in general, whoever is more long-term-oriented has the advantage. Now, you can’t be indefinitely and entirely long-term oriented because there are some short-term things you have to track and goals you have to deliver, especially if you’re working in a company. That’s probably going to be much more of the reality depending on the organization. But I think what you see with successful brands, successful businesses, honestly, successful people and professionals as well, is they are more, not entirely but more, oriented towards long-term.

Because fundamentally what that means to be long-term oriented is that you are prioritizing the value that you can bring to the market you’re serving more than extracting value from that market. I think that that will always do good things to help you grow. Now-

Adam Morgan:

I love that. Sorry. I want to repeat that. Giving more value than taking value from your audience.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah.

Adam Morgan:

That’s awesome.

Eric Fulwiler:

Honestly, that is my, yeah, I don’t know, maybe we’ll do a wrap-up question and I’ll repeat this, but the number one thing, I was writing an interview for a fintech magazine and they were like, “What’s the number one piece of advice you’ve ever received?” I’ve actually never thought about that before. I’ve learned from so many people and read so many, but I’ve never actually thought of what is the one thing. I had to think about it for a while.

What I wrote down comes from Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk, and his whole thesis, his whole brand, all of his businesses are focused on and come from this idea of bring 51% of the value to any equation. You can’t spend seven years with anyone, much less a guy like that and not have some things rub off on you. That has definitely rubbed off on me in terms of my life, how I built my businesses, and certainly how I think about marketing. I think value needs to be the north star for any modern marketer, B2C, but particularly B2B, because so few marketers actually do it. To the conversation we were having before about why all the content looks the same and how it’s all prioritizing lead generation. All of that is extracting value from the audience that you’re trying to serve, as opposed to adding value.

Now, at the end of the day, the role of marketing is to drive growth of the business. It is not just to give without any expectation of return. However, to the long-term/short-term oriented thing. If you can be long-term oriented, if you can focus more on adding value, people are going to want to spend more time with you. And actually at the end of the day, we spend a lot of time talking about creativity, content. What’s the message? Where do you show up? Channels, et cetera. The execution, the thing that matters most, and the scarcest and most valuable commodity for any modern marketer out there is attention.

You need somebody’s attention before you even have a chance to deliver a message to them. And so I think that needs to get prioritized more. And the way that you get people’s attention is you add value to them.

Whether you’re a marketer, whether you’re at a cocktail party. Like you were talking about, people want to talk to the person that is interested and wants to hear what they have to say. All roads lead back to that at the end of the day for me.

Adam Morgan:

Can I throw in one thing about that too?

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah, go for it.

Adam Morgan:

I think it’s gaining attention, is the door in. But in B2B, it’s holding attention.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yes.

Adam Morgan:

Because these sales cycles sometimes are like a year and a half. And so you can’t just be a quick flash in the pan that you care about value, and that one guide that you send out. And then after that, you’re doing just email, email, email, extract, extract, extract. So I totally hear you there, and that would be my push. Keep that attention throughout that whole cycle.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah. And the sales cycle might be a year and a half, and the pre-sale cycle might be four years or five years. So again, to the long term oriented point, to the adding value point, I really think it all comes down to this.

And you mentioned the research that the LinkedIn B2B Institute has put out. One of the stats from that, and they’re kind of trying to make it a rule that B2B marketers follow. They call it the 95-5 rule. And that says that, In their research. And of course they have something to gain from this, so take it with a grain of salt. But I do think it’s true. And I think people anecdotally will see it as true, based on their own experience.

In general, 95% of B2B buyers are not in a buying cycle at the time you’re trying to reach them. So 95% are not even in that one and a half year cycle. They’re in what comes before, which is they’re not looking to buy something. They don’t even know that they need to buy something.

If you are only going to market with a sale-led approach, you are only speaking to the 5%. What about the other 95%? That’s where marketing comes in. You are building an audience, you are attracting and retaining attention. So that when people actually do go into the buying cycle, you have the awareness, you have the equity, you have the consideration.

In my CMO role at 11:FS, I can’t share the specific stats, but the impact of all of the content that we put out with the intention of adding value, not focus on the 5%, led to tremendous uptick in inbound leads, of course. But also velocity through the sales cycle, response rates to outbound. Basically across the board, the sales health metrics were so much higher for people that have been exposed to our, let’s call it 95% content. Content that we put out that wasn’t directly trying to generate a lead.

So I think there is not one way to grow a business. There’s not one way to do this. Even if I am preaching this brand led, or we’re aligned on there needs to be more creativity in B2B. There’s plenty of B2B businesses that have been very successful without doing this. So I’ll put that out there.

I believe in this and I have seen it work, but I think you need to be realistic about the type of organization that you’re in. And every organization is going to have a different balance to how open and capable they are of taking this type of approach. It’s why I took the CMO role that I did at 11:FS because the CEO really believed in it, and was doing a lot of it before.

So I think there’s just the reality of you can change people and you can change organizations, but at best it’s a dial, not a switch. And I’m sure everybody has had those conversations with the CEO, or the CFO, or your product team, or whatever it is. Where part of it is kind of education of trying to bring people on a journey to help them understand the opportunity with this.

More tactically, some of the things that I’ve seen work, if you do want to push this agenda within your organization. I think any change comes from top down and bottom up. The top down is probably what a lot of people are already doing. Have a conversation, try to convince somebody, tell them the theory, share with them the Adam Morgan podcast and blog. Try to shift their perspective.

At the end of the day, particularly when it comes to CFOs and a lot of CEOs, they’ll believe in numbers if you show it to them. That is kind of the universal language. So if you can go bottom up, take a small product within your portfolio, take one campaign, take a quarter of next year. Some type of pilot program where you can prove success.

Now it’s hard because this whole thing is about being long term. How can we prove short term success for a long term strategy? But I think there are ways. To what you said about design. If you invest twice as much in designing your next white paper, do you see an uptick in conversion? You don’t have to prove the entire gospel to get someone to believe that they should be reading the book.

Another one that I know we mentioned before, that I’m a big believer in, is some type of framework for investing in new and different ways of doing things. So there’s one out there that I really like called the 70-20-10 framework, which I think comes from Coca-Cola or IBM. It’s been out around for a while. And what that says is that, as a breakdown of your time, budget, focus, however you want to use it. 70% should be going to tried and true. What you know works, likely what the CEO and CFO have already signed off on.

20% should go to some extension of that. Something that’s a bit outside of that zone, but you’re pretty sure will work. 10%, and this is the one that I think really matters, should go towards moonshot ideas, big ideas, risky ideas. But if they work, they can deliver real return.

And one avenue that could be interesting to try to get people on board with doing more of this, is to try to get sign off for some type of 10% or 20% budget. And I think that it’ll be harder for people to disagree or push back on that being a good idea. Because I think there’s plenty of research and data out there that you need some type of experimentation in order to continue to grow.

Adam Morgan:

What’s interesting about this, your answer to, “How do you create a culture of creativity?” hasn’t even talked about the creative department. You’re talking about proving the value to leadership. You’re talking about building a culture around marketers and others, and how they shape their plans and how they work towards. I think that’s really fascinating, and you made some comment earlier, that’s like, the way to get to great creative isn’t just the people who are making the creative. It takes the whole team to really believe in it.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yeah. And I think part of that is who I am. While I think I’m creative in many ways, I was not the creative director. I was not in the creative department. My job was to create the environment and opportunities for creatives to be successful. It was to sell in the scope. It was to write the brief in the right way. It was to set the client expectations.

And so I think naturally, that’s how I’m wired. When it comes to the creative process is, what do I need to do to set everyone else up for success? But also, chances are if you’re in a creative role, you’re probably pretty good at what you do. And so the constraint, especially if you’re in a B2B business, that’s not creative led, is likely not your ability. It’s the opportunity to actually do what you think should be done to take those creative risks. To push the boundary a little bit, to have more opportunity.

And so, yeah, maybe it’s a bit of a different interview and conversation than the folks that you usually have on. But another way of saying it that I’ve heard from people before is, “There’s the work. And then there’s the work around the work.”

Adam Morgan:

Uh huh.

Eric Fulwiler:

And I think regardless of which one of those you own, both need to get solved for in order to push things in the right direction.

Adam Morgan:

And you need to partner. I’m not saying that the creative leaders have a free pass and like, “Oh, just let the marketers sell it all up and create the culture for you.” Not at all. But I think it’s about building the relationships. And I like what you also said, because I believe in this too, it’s the education. The convincing isn’t a quick show them something. And so they’re like, “Oh, of course, let’s change everything.”

It’s really more of them. It takes a long time to get the story across and for people to understand the value of this long term thinking, and to really go all in, and it’s not a switch. So I do appreciate that.

Also something that I always tell on the show is that, “If you want to lead, you have to read.” And that’s still an education too. It’s not about just educating stakeholders, it’s educating yourself, and getting the data and the ammo and everything else in line, so that you can have those conversations.

Eric Fulwiler:

Totally.

Adam Morgan:

Well, actually that’s an interesting…

Adam Morgan:

… those conversations.

Eric Fulwiler:

Totally.

Adam Morgan:

Well, actually, that’s an interesting thing. So you mentioned, one thing we were going to talk about is, “What do you measure? How do you prove it up?” And I think having the example, at least one case study, of some project that worked, I think, is valuable. I’d also say, something that hits my plate a lot is when people come up and ask, “Hey, I work for this really small B2B something, something, obscure company. How do I get it to be more creative?” And sometimes I have to look at just the business strategy and say, “You have to also… It’s not just the people that you have to be careful of and train and teach, but it’s also the business itself.” If it’s an operational, efficiency business, chances are There’s very little room for however much long term creative thinking there is going to be in that business. So, I’d take a look at that as well.

Eric Fulwiler:

I agree with that, and that’s kind of what I was saying about you need to know the organization you’re in. You need to know the reality, the perspectives that you’re starting from, and there’re the things you can change, and there’re the things that you can’t change, and so you need to make sure that you kind of take stock of that before you figure out your change agenda, and how you want to push that forward.

Adam Morgan:

Well, excellent. Maybe we’ll just end on any last advice that you’d give creative marketers, how they can make a bigger impact, how can they work together, what are maybe some small steps, beyond just getting a good… Maybe even before you get a good campaign together, what would be the first things that you would work on?

Eric Fulwiler:

Maybe this is recapping a bit of what I’ve said already. I think figuring out what are the relationships, what is the human landscape around the work that you want to do and the creative agenda that you want to push, and make sure you’re paying as much attention to that, or someone is paying as much attention to that, even if that’s not your responsibility, because that’s going to enable what you want to do. 

I really think the 70/20/10 framework or some type of structure that you can get people bought in on to ensure that you are intentionally putting aside time, budget to do creative things. Another one that I love is… I had a client at one point who told us, as the agency, he said, “If I don’t see at least one idea in every presentation that makes me uncomfortable, I’m going to be unhappy.”

And so I think there needs to be, whether you’re the creative or you’re the leader of creatives or whatever that is, I think you need to kind of… 70/20/10, 1 idea that makes you uncomfortable, whatever it is, you need to create that environment and expectation that people should be pushing the envelope, because I think that’s where great creative work comes from.

The only other one that I didn’t really touch on yet, that maybe is helpful for people, it’s less tactical, but it’s more of a mindset that might be interesting, 

 We had the whole conversation about attention. And so what I did as CMO of my last company, and kind of what I believe modern B2B marketing should be modeled on, is actually looking at how media companies are structured and what they focus on. Because if you think about it, a media company’s business model is attention. They’re in the business of attracting, retaining, and then monetizing attention. And so at my last job, what I did is I actually split the marketing department into a marketing team that interfaced with sales and was focused on more of that short-term demand-generation type of play, and then I hired someone to head up the media team, which is basically all the content and events that we did.

And the difference between just doing content and events and a media company is he only had media company objectives. His job was to build a modern media company for the audience that we were trying to reach around what we stood for as a business, what our point of differentiation was in the market. And ironically, in the short term, that didn’t generate a lot of returns for the business, but actually in the long term, and it’s part because he and the team were so good at it, we had a pretty big audience that was constantly coming back to us, and it was starting to function as a media company to the point where we actually started generating revenue on the sponsorship of the content for what we wanted to do to drive growth of the business anyway.

So I think as a perspective shift, I think that’s interesting for people to think about is, how can you think more like a media company and not as much only as a marketer? So maybe that’s helpful for people.

Adam Morgan:

Well, that’s interesting. I would love a little more detail on that. So when they had objectives that were only focused on immediate company, am I getting it right, where it was like they were focused on building an audience rather than selling product? Is that kind of an easy way to say that?

Eric Fulwiler:

Yep. They were focused on adding value as opposed to extracting value.

Adam Morgan:

Cool. Wow, that’s interesting. 

Eric Fulwiler:

And actually, it’s not that new of an idea. You go all the way back to the Michelin fine dining guide. What’s a tire company doing, Michelin tires, creating a fine dining guide? You know the Michelin guide?

Adam Morgan:

I didn’t know that.

Eric Fulwiler:

Of rating restaurants. It came from the tire company, because they wanted to sell more tires in late 19th century France, or whatever it was. How do you get people to buy more tires? You give them excuses to drive more. Let’s tell them about restaurants that they could drive to. Red Bull, everything that Red Bull has done around buying sports teams and having people jump out of spaceships and all that. There’s literally Red Bull media, I forget what the name of the company is actually called, it’s a different division. Guinness Book of World Records. And increasingly, even in the B2B space, I wish I could think of some of the examples, but I know Salesforce and a bunch of other… HubSpot, they’re buying media companies, because they see the value or the necessity of having attention. And it’s no longer enough just to do basic content marketing, you need to push it further and actually set up or think like a media company and not just a marketer.

Adam Morgan:

Well, it comes back to that whole story of value. And when you think of your brand as the product… We’ve had discussions about that before, where it’s like not just the means to get and sell your other product, but you think of your brand as a product and then you have to create content that has value around that brand. I think that’s exactly where we need to be for long term.

Eric Fulwiler:

Yep.

Adam Morgan:

Well, this has been great. Thank you. For those who are listening, I hope this was educational. I’m so happy, Eric, to find a kindred spirit who believes so many of the same things. Not that we have this bias of believing the same things, but just to know that out in the middle of the world, we can all come to similar conclusions of what’s the value of what you bring to brands, and how you go about doing it. There is a good way of doing that. So I appreciate talking with you about all this.

And we will put all the links in there; you can all check out all of these research reports we talk about, or the B2B Institute, and we’ll send some links of some videos and some articles for you to read as well so you can get up to speed and feel like you’re also an expert when it comes to making B2B creative. So thank you for listening to all of this. We appreciate it.

So as we conclude here, Eric, first of all, how can viewers or listeners follow your career? Where can they get a hold of you or follow you or watch you, what are the channels they would find you on?

Eric Fulwiler:

So our website for the company is wearerival.com, and then I’m most active on LinkedIn so you can look me up there, Eric Fulwiler. I’m assuming my name will be spelled out in the show notes. And then you can also email me directly: eric, E-R-I-C, @wearerival.com.

Adam Morgan:

Ooh, that was a bold move, giving the email. I’ve done that a few times. Sometimes it works out.

Eric Fulwiler:

Some people take me up on it, so I’m happy to put it out there.

Adam Morgan:

I always say, for the introverts, here are the websites. You can go to realcreativeleadership.com, or you can find me at adamwmorgan.com, or maybe on LinkedIn. And for the extroverts, here’s the email. You can contact us directly and we can keep the conversation going. So that’s pretty fun.

All right. Well anyhow, thank you everyone for listening. This was a fantastic show on how you can make B2B more creative. 

As always, this show is produced by the Stoke Group. If you need an agency to help with creating value and content, you can go to thestokegroup.com. We’d also invite you to engage with us in any way on any of our channels. So you can leave a comment on our website; you can go to YouTube and leave a comment, or any of the many podcast platforms that you listen on. We just appreciate you engaging and asking questions and letting us know if this content is valuable for you. So thanks again. We hope to see you on our episode. Eric, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.

Eric Fulwiler:

Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.

Adam Morgan:

We’ll see you.