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So I spent yes­ter­day at this year’s Insti­tute of Direct Mar­ket­ing Business-to-Business Con­fer­ence. I rarely get to con­fer­ences. Even the ones I book on always seem to fall on days where ‘stuff hap­pens’ and I become another no-show. But yes­ter­day, I actu­ally made it.

And wished I hadn’t.

The only rea­son I will go to events like these is to learn stuff. I’m not inter­ested in the net­work­ing (prob­a­bly because I’m rub­bish at it) and catered food only holds so much appeal. It’s all about new think­ing that chal­lenges the mind and expands my understanding.

Apart from the odd men­tion of blogs and a good overview of search mar­ket­ing (pre­sented really well by Chris War­wick of Hoover’s) this could have been a con­fer­ence in 1997 rather than 2007. We were told of the need to under­stand busi­ness cus­tomers as peo­ple. How mar­ket­ing and sales really should get on bet­ter. And given an insight into how a cam­paign can progress from “frankly we don’t know what we’re doing” to “for the most part, we do know what we’re doing.”

I then joined the “mar­ket­ing to cor­po­rates” stream that con­sci­en­tiously avoided any men­tion what­so­ever of how to mar­ket to cor­po­rates. Soon after, I lost the will to live.

Business-to-business has always been FMCG’s ugly sis­ter. But the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties within B2B/considered pur­chase are (IMHO) far more inter­est­ing than FMCG. The com­plex­ity of the sales. The need to really engage with the mar­ket over a long period. The chance to part­ner with cus­tomers. All offer mas­sive scope for inno­v­a­tive think­ing and fresh approaches.

If what I saw yes­ter­day is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of where most of the indus­try is at, we should all be very afraid.

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