I chose B2B marketing. To be specific, I chose to build an agency that mostly works with enterprise software companies. Why? Because I believe that positive change on every level can start at work. Consequently, our clients are companies that have the potential to change the human experience.
There is a myth that B2B marketing is the bottom of the barrel. “All the really good marketers work for big consumer brands! Everyone else just couldn’t cut it.” Bullshit. You go sell cologne. We’re busy changing the world.
Our clients sell software products that make people happier, healthier, and wealthier. Their solutions get people in shape, advance their careers, develop warm relationships with other humans, and help them live their best lives. If that sounds corny to you, that’s OK. We’ll probably never work together anyway because you’re cynical; and what the world needs now is love, sweet love.
I saw an opportunity when I founded this agency — an opportunity to help business software products that benefit the human experience tell their story in a more authentic, human way. More than a decade later, we’re challenging the conventional views of best practices in B2B marketing. We’re helping companies connect with their business buyers on a personal, emotional level. We’re helping them overcome their fear of being true to themselves. We’re helping them gain purchase in a world that is ready to embrace optimism and warm authenticity.
It has been my personal mission to push the human context to the forefront of B2B marketing. In pursuit of that mission, I have created reliable models for approaching the market with unique brands, messages, and promotion strategies that win the hearts of buyers well before they’re ready to contemplate feature differentiation or ROI. Our clients become market leaders by following our counterintuitive models. And along the way, they rekindle the fire in their belly.
Marketing is supposed to be creative. We have a generation of B2B marketers who have had the creativity kicked out of them by misguided marketing philosophies that value conversion rates over end-game results. There is a place for direct marketing metrics (and we rely upon them heavily) — but the tactic was not supposed to become the strategy.
I’m changing B2B marketing by helping marketers take risks and have fun again. And because of that, companies buy their solutions. And the solutions they sell are changing the world.
So you have fun with that next car commercial. I’m going to shift the tide of optimism in our country and around the world and make people’s lives better by helping to create better work and life experiences.
Bret Starr is the founder, partner, president, and CEO of The Starr Conspiracy, a strategic marketing and advertising agency in Fort Worth focusing on enterprise software and solutions in the human capital management arena.