Cutting through the boring world of B2B marketing

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INTRODUCTION

This week I want to break the rules. I am going to do something I have never done before. I am going to show you first-hand how I apply all the things I have taught you over the last 10 months. Specifically, I am going to show you the strategic & creative thinking behind Defiant’s (the agency I co-founded) latest campaign. Want to learn all my secrets? Let’s begin…

#1 STRONG STARTS

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know I advocate for better problems. Problems that go beyond the obvious and uncover something more interesting & useful to work with. Why is this so important? Well, the answers you eventually get to will only ever be as good as the initial problems you identify. And this is why, as with all of our clients, we took the time to identify better problems.

At first glance, Work Life’s problems are fairly obvious. They compete in an increasingly competitive co-working category. A category where the likes of WeWork have far greater awareness & spend than the smaller Work Life brand. Now some agencies might have stopped there. They might simply state that the problem is simply we are outspent & outshouted. They might have also offered up a fairly generic response in return (eg be disruptive or outsmart if you cannot outspend). Whilst these initial responses might be true they are fairly generic and not all that helpful. That’s why decided to dig deeper & define better problems. Want to know what we found? Let me show you…

COVID-19 has changed many facets of our lives but none more so than the world of work & our attitudes towards it. In fact, it’s safe to say that we have thought more about work in the last two years than over the previous two decades. Simply, people were no longer willing to blindly accept five days in an office & all the bullsh*t that comes along with that anymore.

What was most interesting, however, is that no co-working or office brand had yet to tap into this growing & important conversation. Most brands simply blindly continued to talk about their various features or benefits in a fairly generic way. In light of this, we realised there was a big & better problem to address. We realised we should tap into & reflect this new and emerging conversation around the world of work.

#2 CULTURE FIRST

Fame, as many of you will know, is my obsession. Even if you never end up working with us at Defiant please just take one thing away from this newsletter... Fame is the single biggest driver of brand growth & what you should always aim for. What is one of the best ways to spark fame and get people talking about your brand? Tap into what people are already talking about (ie culture). And this is exactly what we aimed to do with our approach to Work Life’s new brand repositioning. Let me break down what we did below.

Looking toward culture research realised the world of work was locked into a heated battle. On the one hand, most CEOs & founders wanted employees back in the office full-time five days a week. It allowed them to more closely monitor staff & they believed it made their workforce more productive. On the other hand, however, employees wanted a more flexible way to work. Their desires, we found, were increasingly at odds with CEOs & founders. We realised that in order to develop an effective new brand positioning for Work-Life we first needed to find a way to resolve this tension. So we decided to dive deeper into this issue with consumer research.

Research revealed something interesting. Whilst on the surface CEOS & employees were at odds, they did share some common ground. They both missed and hated the same aspects of office life. They missed the social aspects of office life, collaborating in real life and hanging out with their ‘workmates’. What they both hated, however, was all the annoying bullsh*t that made work…well hard work. Stuff like messy offices, annoying coworkers, tiny desks and burnt coffee you couldn’t pay them to drink.

It was these shared beliefs, we realised, that could offer up a potential path forward for the brand…

• First, it was something no other co-working brand had leaned into. Most coworking advertising is cliche & generic. They all reflected an idealised view of office life & never call out the bad stuff we all love to hate.

• Second, Work Life had a unique right to take on all those things that make work, hard work. Why? Well because the company had a founding mission to improve happiness in the workplace.

Putting this all together we got to a more powerful & distinctive brand positioning as you can see below.

This positioning of ‘We remove the hard work from working happy' allowed the brand to punch above its weight and start a new conversation in the co-working space category. And it was brought to life in a far more irreverent & distinctive way than the category had ever seen before…as you will see in the final section below.

COMMUNITY SHOUT OUT

Before I get on to this final section of this newsletter I want to first break another quick rule. I want to give not one but three shout-outs to three legendary readers. Big thank you to Michelle McClure , Oliver Budworth & Steph Egger for shouting out Grow Club over the last couple of months.

Want to get a shout-out to thousands of CMOs, CEOS & founders next week? Simply write something nice about Grow Club on Linkedin & tag me. The more you share the more we can grow this community 🎉🎉🎉.

#3 BRAND WORLD

I had a chat with a co-founder the other week which whilst wonderful did leave me a little bit shocked. They thought that Defiant only did strategy work when nothing could be further from the truth. At Defiant we specialise in working alongside brand teams to help with strategy, creative, production & media buying. No matter whether you an in-house creative team looking for a strategic boost or a brand looking for a full external team, we can help. If you are interested in seeing more examples of our current & previous work simply click here.

In truth, our creative capabilities are in many ways our secret weapon. Why? Well, when you work with us you get access to our blackbook of the very best creatives from around the world. Ones we have worked with over the last seventeen years at the most awarded agencies in the world. The very same ones who also helped us to develop a radically new approach to Work Life. A bold & distinctive approach the likes of the co-working category have never seen before. Want to know more? Let me show you how the strategy was brought to life below.

We realised that our ambition was to go far beyond a creative campaign. If we want to be the brand that removes hard work, from working happy, we need this to be reflected in every touch point. So we focused on creating a brand world, not a creative campaign. A world filled with funny & relatable characters who had to endure all the worst bits of office life.

Once we had begun to define our brand world we then began to place our characters in relatable bad office situations, which many of us could relate to. First & foremost via hard working short format social films.

We then expanded our world to high-impact OOH placements across London & Manchester.

All of this is just the beginning, however, and the campaign is beginning to roll out across every touchpoint of the brand - from workspaces to stickers and eventually merch.

We also wrapped everything together into a ‘60 poem calling out the worst of office bullsh*t too. Which you can see below.

CONCLUSION

So what are the main lessons from this week’s newsletter? Well let me breakdown them down below:

• Avoid working with teams that don’t take the time to define better problems. If they stop at the obvious their work will never be as effective.

• If you want to aim for fame, aim to be culture first.

• If you want fresh & bold creative work…come say hi to us at Defiant 😉

Finally would love to know whether you like, love or hate the work? Please just spend 2secs replying to this email.

Many thanks,

Will Poskett,
Founder of Defiant

PS Sorry there was no newsletter last week i was away on holiday

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