When making the case for brand marketing, I ask folks to check which newsletters that have opened and not in their inboxes, and why. Why don’t you have a look too now?
You will find that the ones you open are from brands that you trust and appreciate the most, beyond what they have to say. You will also see a few unopened ones from brands you like but feel like you’re being spammed from, are are starting to fall out of love with. The rest of the un-opened, you just don’t care about.
This exercise is about good and bad email marketing practices too, of course. But driving your open rate is your perception of a brand.
What is Brand Marketing, and why is important?
Let’s define this as people confuse brand with a company’s logo and visual language. That’s part of it, but not it.
Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur, and marketing expert, nails the definition:
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
Everything you do as a business, and representing a business, affects this and, ultimately, why people buy your products and services, or not. It’s powerful too. Strong brands attract raving fans – the promoters that score a brand 9 or 10 on a NPS questionnaire. That’s what you want, and you certainly don’t want the opposite: detractors put off by a crappy product and/or experience.
Historically, brand hasn’t played an important role in B2B tech Marketer’s plans. It was, and still is, considered more of a thing done in B2C. KitKat, for example, has been telling us to ‘have a break’ since 1957. It has been so effective over the decades, that there is no chance in the world that they will ever change it.
Another great example is from the most valuable brand in 2024 according to Statista: Apple. In the 90s, they nearly went bankrupt but were saved by Steve Job’s genius as a product designer and marketer. While every other computer company was competing on and talking about specs, Apple’s advertising campaign spoke to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.
Today, the power of Apple’s brand means that they can charge a premium for their product, and that you will are much more likely to open one of their emails than a Microsoft newsletter.
A lot of the more well now B2B tech Marketing experts are saying the same in their podcasts and newsletters. Unless you invest in brand-building, it’s going to be hard to cut through the noise. And it’s getting noisier thanks to AI, the hundreds of new tools being launched, and growing competition.
This doesn’t mean that you have to stop investing in Direct Response – strategies and tactics that get you are result straight away, such as advertising or Black Friday campaigns. The two can co-exist. In fact, the can and should complement each other.
This graph offers a clear explanation of the difference between the two over time. I guess you could think of it like growing your organic search traffic Vs advertising on Google Ads.
The graph is self explanatory, but you may have missed how the effectiveness of Direct Response increases over time. But it does so thanks to Brand.
What about WordPress brands?
I won’t cover Brand Architecture in this post as it can get complex. In the WordPress ecosystem, we have an interesting dynamic where we are all associated to an open source product: WordPress. A lot of us have named about businesses ‘WP Something’ or ‘SomethingWP’, which has its pros and cons. Before I cover these, let’s look at a couple of successful WordPress businesses that have successfully invested in their brands.
Kinsta’s brand re-fresh, back in 2023
When I wrote about it I described it as bold and brave. and more specifically:
Looking at the new design more closely, there are two elements that have triggered people’s reactions, good or bad: the new color palette, and the logo icon. They are using a different font too but I doubt most people will have noticed it.
The icon really stands out. It is a big departure from the crisp and somewhat minimalist representations of tech ideas – clouds, hardware, wires, etc… that we typically see in logos.
The website design is even more of an outlier now. We’re used to SaaS-blue, white space galore and the usual 3D vector images of people and tech. Instead, Kinsta presents us with colors that have never been juxtaposed: a hero block featuring a dark brown with a tinge of red background and electric-orange digital lava lamp bubbles. Love it or hate it, you will find it hard to forget.
The result? They got a lot of people talking. If you land on the homepages, they are hard to forget. I’m seeing their ads all over Facebook at the moment, in the same style, so we can safely assume that the re-fresh worked out. Looking at the exercise more academically, it’s Kinsta telling us… hey, we’re going to go a bit crazy with our design because we don’t wanna look like everyone else, and if you don’t like it… we don’t care.
Liquid Web launching StellarWP
A big part of this exercise was to give a more WordPress-friendly face to its portfolio WordPress products. In their announcement they explained this this way:
StellarWP is home to all of the ecommerce products and services who have joined us so far, which include some of the most beloved and dependable tools in the industry. Just like our users rely on us at Liquid Web for their managed WordPress hosting needs, we are confident that StellarWP will become the go-to resource for users in search of products that will take their sites and businesses to the next level.
I think this move has been extremely successful. They have delivered on their promise of committing to quality and, as the StellarWP Our Story page says, being leaders of innovation in WordPress. If you follow them in the various communities and Slack groups, you know this is true.
The rise of Rocket.net
Rocket.net makes interesting case study in brand positioning. The came to market with a category-defining proposition: Rocket.net is the only all-in-one WordPress platform that’s optimized and delivered by Cloudflare Enterprise. The technology wasn’t new, of course, but their solution certainly unique, as their position was.
Much of their success is due to their product and positioning. Marketing played a part too, and Ben Gabler, Rocket.net’s founder, has shared his approach in his must-read post – How Rocket.net Bootstrapped Our Way To $1MM ARR and Beyond. Here’s an important part of the story:
Getting your first 100 customers is always the most difficult thing in building a business. No one knows about you, no one trusts you, and you’re simply the new kid on the block. This is where strong branding comes in. And what does every company need?
A domain name.
Originally they had onRocket.com, but Ben decided to invest a considerable amount of money to buy rocket.net. A brave move that paid off, and that he describes as “one of the best professional decisions I’ve ever made in my life!”
Why? Well, apart from representing the products features, it’s a known word and easy to remember.
What’s interesting now is that, having grown to a certain size, their position is much more generic: “Fast & Secure Hosting for WordPress”. There is no mention of Cloudflare on their homepage either! It’s still an integral part of the offering, but they don’t need to leverage it for differentiation. Positions and narratives can evolve, as can the brand.
The #WPDrama is a risk to WordPress brands
There is no doubt that it has affected the WordPress brand and the broader ecosystem. I had started tracking media coverage but gave up mid-November. There was a lot there, and most of it was negative press for Automattic and Matt Mullenweg.
More recently, the media has picked up on his fears that the project could be dramatically affected – Mullenweg Says Lawsuits Could End WordPress. Imagine being a business researching CMS solutions and coming across him saying that “the lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org.”
I don’t want to sound too alarmist but WordPress businesses are at risk, even if it means losing clients or growing slower. Which is why we’re starting to see some established businesses diversify beyond WordPress. Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins is keeping a #ShopifyDiary on X as her business builds its first Shopify product. Are you considering doing the same?
I’m sure there are many WordPress product owners that are worried about their use of WP in their name, including myself. It does make it harder to position for non-WordPress offerings, and there is also the trademark issue to consider. The WordPress Foundation isn’t 100$ clear about it:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not.
Does your business name sounds as if it’s associated with WordPress?
On the plus side, the association via ‘WP’ in your business name makes you instantly recognizable to those that matter: prospects, customers, and partners interested in your WordPress product. As it has been the case for the last 20 years, and hopefull will be for 20 more.
As a minimum, take time to think about your brand
Do it as a risk assessment exercise in light of the #WPDrama. Talk to some lawyers too, if you can.
It’s also an opportunity to review the fundamentals:
- Does my brand represent who we are and what our vision is?
- Is it memorable? Clear? Unique?
- Is it reflected correctly in our Marketing – do people understand it? Do they like it?
- How is it talked about in the various channels?
If you manage multiple brands, review the architecture. Do you need an umbrella brand like StellartWP?
A good starting point is to understand how your brand is perceived internally. I once worked for a software company of about 100 people that surveyed its employees to learn that most had a negative idea about it, which a big red flag. You want your staff to love the brand they work for, right?
Next, organize a survey to understand how your brand is perceived externally. You will get a lot of useful insight, even about your product. Here’s what you should aim to learn:
- Whether the user experience is aligned with your brand position and values
- What people think about your brand – sentiment analysis
- How they compare you against your competitors
It doesn’t have to be an expensive exercise either. You can start by inviting your customers and subscribers, and then try to get folks in the social channels to participate.
Once you have a good set of qualitative and quantitive data, you should have a good idea of what is working and what isn’t.
Qualtrics, a major research company, cover this process well here.
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