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Writer's pictureJohn Woods

Harnessing fluent branding devices to build B2B familiarity

Updated: Sep 18, 2023


While the distinction between B2B brand and branding is often clouded, recognising the differences between the two is crucially important. Whereas the former focuses on how your organisation is perceived by customers and prospects, the latter is a set of actions or memory creating devices designed to drive salience and consideration.


Though there are many devices your organisation can employ to build awareness and create stronger emotional connections with your audience, this post leverages insights from “Mogic’s guide to making marketing more memorable” to explore one device most B2B marketers often fail to consider. We call this the fluent device.


What are fluent devices?

If familiarity is the key to making brand marketing more memorable, then fluent devices are one of the most effective ways to achieve it. From Salesforce's Astro, Codey & Friends (above) to the Geico gecko (below) to Intel's sonic nemonic (everywhere), fluent devices are the transferable characters, slogans, visual devices and jingles brands use to build memory structures deep within our consciousness.

Okta's 'Circles of Trust' is a simple fluent visual device from the LogicLogicMagic stable, utilised to increase brand awareness across different demand generation campaigns.

When done correctly, fluent devices have the power to significantly increase the long-term success rate of any brand by driving the familiarity and assurance all buyers crave. While largely under-utilised in the realm of B2B, campaigns that use fluent devices stand a much greater chance of generating profit gain and market share growth than those that don’t. So, why aren’t they used more often?


What advantages can fluent devices offer to B2B marketers?

While fluent devices have been highly successful in the B2C space, many traditional B2B marketing agencies still fail to see past short-term activation value. Instead of creating distinctive assets that promote long-term branding, their focus often falls on lead generation and sales activation alone – but the tides of change are turning.


Much like consumers, businesspeople today form their buying decisions based on emotional intelligence just as much as rational intelligence. They reserve their trust for the brands they know, and familiarity has become the key differentiator when both price and product are exhausted. By entertaining audiences and creating strong memory structures, fluent devices help strengthen the bond between brand and buyer to increase loyalty, repeated sales, and exponential growth.


Why is now the best time to start using fluent devices in B2B?

Despite their effectiveness and proven success rate across multiple platforms, the use of fluent devices in advertising has fallen from 41% in 1992 to just 12% in the present day. It’s believed this decline began with the rise of digital media, and the assumption that audiences respond better to content that’s relevant and targeted than assets built for artifice and entertainment.


Yet, as any walk through the hipster stronghold of Shoreditch High Street will show you, fashion has a knack for coming back around. What was old is now new again. And with companies like Salesforce now incorporating character-led fluent devices into their branding, we can already see how this retro marketing approach is adding value in the B2B space.


How can LogicLogicMagic help?

For organisations that want to stay ahead of the curve, LogicLogicMagic is the perfect fit. Like Salesforce, we’ve been building a brand world of our own - the Zen technology garden - and we’d be happy to use our skills to create something similar for your business.


By combining more than twenty years of award-winning B2C creativity with a similar amount of B2B technology experience, our vast knowledge of the technology marketplace and creative marketing brings you the best of both worlds. Our focus is to help technology businesses across both B2B and B2C markets grow their brands and sales, using a methodology that combines logic and magic. Fluent devices are a core part of this approach.


If you're interested in learning more about the LogicLogicMagic approach and how we can help your organisation establish stronger connections with your target audience, you can download our quick guide: "11 ways to making technology marketing memorable", or the more comprehensive: "Mogic's guide to making marketing more memorable"


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