Recently, Marketing Week launched its Vision 100 list. It purports to highlight the 100 most visionary marketers around. It’s a great list, full of inspirational people who have genuine achievements to their names. However, you’ll be lucky to find a B2B marketer in there, and that’s disappointing.
The absence of B2B marketers highlights a myopia in a sector infatuated with the shiny, the whizzy and the new, often to the detriment of traditional activities that, over the course of a campaign, help deliver significant revenues.
Marketing to businesses is too often pigeonholed as trade listings, dull conferences and branded mugs. Yet look at outstanding campaigns such as IBM’s smarter planet and GE’s ecomagination, or the speed with which Adobe (ironically, sponsor of the Vision 100) powered its way into the marketing analytics business. These are all solid examples of visionary marketing that has helped build stronger businesses.
The people driving these creative, sector-defining initiatives really ought to be recognised alongside their consumer brand peers.
This letter originally appeared here in Marketing Week. It also inspired Marketing Week’s editor’s column here.