I'm Still a C, Even When I'm a B ...

You know what part of “business as usual” has always gotten on my nerves? Jargon. Especially when people reduce jargon to initials. RoI. SWAT. CMS. EoD. And then there is my personal, all-time favorites: B2B and B2C.

If it helps to frame my despise, I was never of fan of R2D2 or C3PO either. But I digress.

Can of Cultures

Isn’t it odd how many cultural demarcations we have in society? We behave in a certain way when we are at home. We behave a certain way when we are at the office. And we behave an entirely different way when we are out socially. I guess it is just the way society works. But, in the mix of all that, is the way we behave when go to work and deal with other companies.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You get to the work and go straight to your office. You take your coffee back to your desk and answer the phone. It’s a vendor and you slip into your more formal, slightly deeper tone and mannerism. You talk about costs and discounts and timelines. It’s all quite formal.

Or maybe you are making the call, as the vendor. You make sure to convey value and build trust. You use all the keywords that your marketing department fed to you and you work very hard to keep it all quite professional. Professional and not at all natural.

B2B, B2C, and What it Means to Me

Here is the problem: for some reason we have fooled ourselves into believing that consumers buy things and businesses buy things. Therefore, we’ve determined that we must work one way to sell things to individuals and another to sell to companies. But, aren’t companies comprised of individuals? And isn’t every individual a consumer?

When did we decide that people somehow become robots when they arrive at the office? As if, suddenly, all the marketing tactics and approaches that persuade buyers on the weekend suddenly cease to work on Monday morning. Or when did the plain old-fashioned human approach become inappropriate?

I have the best relationships with vendor representatives who provide quality services and products, but with a human tone. They are warm and eager to help. In very few ways am I interested in dealing with “B2B” vendors who want to sell me servers the way automated lifts move boxes around.

If you can’t seem to muster the ability to be a human being at least have the decency to market to me the way Coca-Cola does. It may not be any more genuine, but at least it is familiar …