Ged Carroll

Brand building for B2B PRs

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Brand building for B2B PRs is a write up of an interview that I did with Miles Clayton of Agility PR. We talked about the importance of brand building, client challenges and techniques.

Participants:

  • Miles: Host (Agility PR)
  • Ged Carroll

Miles: I’d like to welcome Ged Carroll, a guru on brand building and advertising working with major tech and consumer brands. He offers insight into the world of proper advertising—campaigns we know and love—and where the industry is leading today.

Welcome, Ged. Could you talk through what you’re doing at the moment and your current challenges?

Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I am currently wrapping up an engagement with Google Cloud, working with their internal creative agency as a temporary vendor contractor.

My work focuses on brand building: out-of-home advertising, video advertising, and events. We look at how those creative experiences come to life through major trade shows and Google-hosted events. There is also sports sponsorship; for instance, the Formula E activation. Even though it’s a B2B brand, many tactics are exposed to a broader audience than just direct customers.

Miles: That’s fascinating. Regarding brand building—something many brands under-invest in—could you explain why it is important and how it differs from brand activation or performance marketing? I’d argue performance marketing is the obsession in B2B, but why should brand building weigh higher?

Ged Carroll: I’ll first address why brands focus on performance marketing, then explain brand building’s importance. Brands focus on performance marketing because they are measured on 90-day periods. They can simply say, “Here’s the money spent, here’s the result.” Measures include customer acquisition cost or engagement metrics along a marketing funnel. These seem like concrete measures.

Why do brand building? Smaller B2B brands often hesitate because of what Professor Byron Sharp calls “Double Jeopardy”: smaller brands have less market penetration and less loyal customers. Consequently, small enterprise software companies have a harder time moving the needle than larger ones. The bigger you are, the better you do; it has a flywheel effect.

What helps sell product is “mental availability.” If I think B2B PR, you want me to think “Miles.” For chocolate, you think Cadbury. For B2B software, most developers now think AWS. Fifteen years ago, that would have been Microsoft.

Miles: I sympathize. I’ve worked with brands famous in particular markets that struggled to break into adjacent markets because they hadn’t built the brand there.

Ged Carroll: That creates a “chicken and egg” situation: do you invest, or try a “cargo cult” approach replicating past success? Past success was likely a confluence of luck, timing, and good practice. Many overnight successes are decades in the making. Huawei seemed to spring from nowhere but is four decades old. Breaking one customer, BT, made them famous. That fame cracked the market.

Miles: Brand building is critical. You mentioned that in a typical SaaS subscription business, you should invest about 70% in brand building?

Ged Carroll: Heuristically, for a subscription business, about 70% should go into brand building and 30% into brand activation.

Brand building includes PR. I ask: how can we make this idea work for earned media as well? Does the campaign scale to generate “talkability”—people discussing it at the water cooler, in trade magazines, or on social media? Paid media works harder if you have talkability around it.

Miles: Is that what is now called integrated campaigns?

Ged Carroll: Integrated campaigns have been around for 30 years. People used to discuss “media neutral” strategies. The core idea is that your paid media works significantly harder if the campaign generates conversation.

Miles: That starts with great advertising principles. The book Look Out focuses on “right brain” thinking. Can we discuss the right versus left brain tussle in advertising and how to address it?

Ged Carroll: Marketing has changed, but our thinking is hardwired by evolution. Analytical procrastination creates cognitive load. If our ancestors sat thinking, “Do I want this or this?”, a predator would have eaten them before they decided.

Miles: By the time you selected the next iPhone, you’re dead.

Ged Carroll: Exactly. Logical “System 2” thinking is an artificial construct, yet B2B marketers often communicate rational benefits this way. However, we evolved instantaneous “System 1” thinking, which emotions tap into. If I feel something sharp, I instantly move. That is why we don’t remember a commute unless something significant happens.

Current advertising often treats us as rational decision-makers, but feelings have a longer-term impact. If I feel sharp stones, I build longer-term thinking to wear sandals next time. Traditionally, advertising tapped into this. Brands like Accenture or Google Cloud attach themselves to emotional events like sports, or consumer ads use storytelling to build memory structures and automatic association.

Miles: Absolutely.

Ged Carroll: Procurement processes try to force a rational view, but organisational load often short-circuits this. Do you care where you buy paper clips? No, you go to the fastest place. Brand building gets you onto that procurement shortlist. Furthermore, people aren’t in the mood to buy 95% of the time. Unless you build memory structures while they are inactive, you won’t be considered when they are in the market.

Miles: Smaller companies can’t afford TV or billboards. What do you advise? I offer thought leadership and education. Tech businesses often say, “You aren’t buying now, but do you want to learn about prompts?” Is that brand building?

Ged Carroll: It could be. But whose brand is it building? It might just build the LLM model’s brand. My mum asks me to “Ask Google” about crochet patterns. She blames the specific websites for bad patterns, not Google. She associates Google with getting what she wants.

With thought leadership, are you building the person’s personal brand, or the company brand?

Miles: That’s an interesting question. I often do personal brand building for the CEO or CTO to express the business vision. But below the C-suite, say a VP of Sales, is it their brand you’re building rather than the company’s? Especially given high turnover.

Ged Carroll: Exactly. Founder-managers are different; they stay longer. Professional CEOs shipped in by VCs might only stay a few years. B2B marketers face dilemmas, not just choices. It’s about making the best choice within those dilemmas.

Miles: There are parallels between advertising and B2B marketing, but also budget challenges. Media has changed; 15 years ago, clients bought display ads to build brand. Now, the digital tendency is toward content and performance marketing. Is business stuck in short-term goal-orientated thinking?

Ged Carroll: It’s not strictly a B2B or B2C problem. We measure what can be coded. Ad-tech stacks are based on interactivity, not marketing science. We assume if someone does X, Y will happen—the sales funnel concept. The sales funnel is an interesting mental model, but it comes from century-old door-to-door sales and assumes rational decision-making.

Miles: You’re saying consistent brand building short-circuits the funnel, leading straight to the sale.

Ged Carroll: Yes. When you want a beer, you choose Heineken because it’s in your mind. The consideration process shrinks. Brand building gets you into that consideration process much faster. Regularity is vital to reach people the 95% of the time they aren’t ready to buy.

Miles: Look Out discusses the narrowing and fragmentation of attention. Are there ways through that?

Ged Carroll: We have more media opportunities now, but fragmentation occurs because we have smaller gaps of consumption time to fill—like checking a smartphone on the tube. Unless you have repetition within those small gaps, you won’t build memory structures. It’s hard to make a six-second spot emotional.

You need an integrated approach: emotion and storytelling in long-form content (like a documentary), supported by short content that directs people to it. In B2C, this is easier using brand cues: music, mascots, fonts, colors. Build those cues and stick with them. Marketers often get bored of a campaign and change it, but the audience hasn’t seen it enough. Stick with it.

Miles: Stick with it.

Ged Carroll: Many consumer adverts run for years. My dad’s favorite Twix advert is from 2022. Flash has used the same dog and music for five years. Great brand-building campaigns “burn in” rather than “burn out.” Performance marketing might focus on a new feature, but it relies on the brand association already built.

Miles: It’s been a fascinating discussion crossing advertising, brand building, and B2B marketing. My big takeaway is to encourage more right-brain thinking. Thank you for your time, Ged.

Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I look forward to chatting again.

You can watch the interview on video here.

I gave Miles a reading list in advance of us chatting. Here it is:

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