“Yeah, I know you guys. Seen your Ads. Talk on.”
Said the channel partner I was pitching to during my first job at Virgin Mobile.
As a salesperson managing a territory, I was excited & intrigued by how a challenger brand (the tenth entrant in a massively competitive Telecom category) could capture consumer mind-share in a short time.
The power of marketing, I mumbled to myself.
Challenger brands are a fascinating study in understanding how to upend conventional tradition (category rules) and question authority (incumbents).
Challenger brands are like rebellious adolescents, suddenly endowed with the power to perceive their world in a new light. This is the world of how things “should be” Vs “how much things suck today”.
Unlike market leaders, these brands need to focus on both experience (product delivery) and perception (marketing) concurrently. And they are not necessarily resource-rich.
It is easy to see how the Virgin Marketing Playbook can be imitated and customized for a B2C or D2C set up, but that would be uninteresting. The appropriate stress test would be how replicable this playbook is in the world of B2B SaaS, which is one of the most exciting industries as far as product development goes, but not the most courageous when it comes to led growth.
But before we move on, let us unpack the Virgin Marketing Playbook.
At the cost of simplifying the playbook and focus on the core elements that make the brand, I divide my analysis into two parts-
The Ingredients – what combination of factors makes market-entry ideal
The Recipe – the set of tactics that the brand deploys to win that market
TLDR; This is the Virgin Marketing Playbook-
There is a lot of magic that this recipe packs:
Pick an under-served target audience in a commoditized category
Virgin Mobile picks an audience whose needs have largely been ignored by incumbents. It then identifies certain psychographic variables and layers them on top of the demographic parameters to arrive at its target audience – the 15-30-year-old Urban Youth, further segmented as the Pioneer Youth, Mainstream Youth, In-touch Organizers, Mainstream materialists, and Experiencers
Hack Attention >> Optimize Impressions
Make your brand “interesting”
It is as if every marketer with Virgin probably asks herself, “What do we do to stop our audience on its tracks and save them from the infinite scroll death that social media is?” She pauses and then she answers, “Talkability test. Every creative output should pass this test.”
Own those channels that have a human-human connection – social media, customer support et al. Conversations over Selling. Great content and publicity over paid advertisements.
Build your brand from the inside out. Social media participation is naturally knitted into the fabric of the Virgin brand - culture, values & employees.
Craft a visual brand identity that engages the audience’s eye - the Virgin logo is simple, exudes energy and attitude – and is reinforced across channels.
This is the famous sky-walk stunt by Sir Branson for the Virgin Mobile India launch.
Now, not every founder carries this flamboyance. But if you trust your marketing team enough (and if they are bold), you could get close.
Personify the brand
The No.1 step here is to define your Brand archetype. A brand archetype is a way of presenting a brand-it’s symbols and behaviors-making it seem more human and relatable
Many product startup founders still squirm at this concept only to realize it's relevance too late into their journey. However, by that time, a brand image/perception gets created by default which compels you to over-spend to alter that.
What is Virgin’s Brand archetype-
Virgin carefully curated its “Outlaw” brand archetype to create a distinct personality
Source - Choosing brand archetypes
A simple test to validate whether a brand was successful in establishing desired imagery is to ask your prospects and customers what words they’d associate with your brand when they are with a friend in a bar. For Virgin, those were - Unconventional, innovative, fun, irreverent, informal & honest. Consistently. And this association was reinforced via every social post, display banner, OOH.
Virgin used its tone of voice as the central weapon, not as a tailpiece - be it brand communication, customer support, and social media responses
KISS - Keep it simple silly – the tone of voice guide for Virgin Mobile Australia
●
Elevate & reframe the discussion
Feature-selling does not cut it in a crowded category. Storytelling wins over feature-selling. Every single day.
Do you have a version of the David Vs Goliath story to narrate? Or can you create one?
Talk about what is wrong with this world (or the incumbents) and why every living being walking the surface of the planet deserves something much better. For Virgin Mobile, an angle was the deplorable customer experience provided by the incumbents.
Virgin dared to ask out loud, “How about a better world where every human deserved to speak to someone from the same species?”
The Virgin Marketing Playbook is perhaps one of the most exciting playbooks for any marketer.
But I would never expect a B2B SaaS product to ever consider this playbook as relevant, let alone adopt it and give it its own spin.
Welcome, Gong.
Before we delve deeper, it is important to note that there are two major differences between Virgin & Gong:
The market structure. I argue that the market for Gong is relatively more crowded than Virgin - the “market for buyer attention”, not the “market for product”.
Richard Branson
As #2 is uncontrollable, let’s talk about 1- the “Market for buyer attention”.
This is how I define the “Market for buyer attention”-
Every pixel that your audience gets bombarded with = Your direct competition + Your indirect competition
Gong’s target audience is Salespeople, a persona whose attention is split across building their Q4 pipeline, their CRM, missed commissions, Sales team productivity, Salesforce, Forecasting, Hubspot, that deal that suddenly went cold…. you get the drift.
In the world of B2B, Sales technology is one of the most crowded categories.
And then there is the direct competition - Chorus.ai and others.
But before we discuss Gong’s unique recipe, there are two areas (that are not often not discussed) where Gong stands out.
The only B2B brand that hates being too sensible
Most B2B brands (by the way, there is a reason most are called vendors, not brands) that speak to their audience operate like a “B2B brand ought to”.
Too sensible. Too rational.
As Rory Sutherland says, “Being sensible is completely overrated if you care about beating the competition. You’ll never win by doing things the same way as your peers.”
Easier said than done. It takes a ton of courage to not sound sensible to a seemingly “rational-only minded” B2B audience. But Gong’s CMO, Udi decided to do exactly that.
Accepts the reality of its category
Do you have a “product-led, persistent” competitive advantage?
Most products do not.
Gong belongs to a product category defined by AI as the underlying layer. This is a category where the speed to acquire customers is critical to success.
A differentiated product is just not sufficient.
So, Gong decides to create a “perceptual” competitive advantage.
Now, the big question. How is Gong’s marketing recipe like that of Virgin’s?
Pick an under-served target audience in a crowded category of attention
But B2B is a nuanced play. While most players are busy “marketing to the wallets” (decision-makers/senior titles within an organization), Gong “celebrates its potential end-users”, eventually creating champions and influencers who will one day vote with their numbers.
This strategy gives its marketing greater organic reach than the competition. It also ensures that its fans do a lot of work for the brand, many a time acting as its extended customer support arm on forums.
Hack Attention >> Optimize Impressions
Move beyond “interesting”. How about being “wacky”?
Take a glance at this conventional “value-builder” content by Gong. What else would you call it but wacky?
Value + Provocativeness = Guaranteed attention
Use social media to “chat with your audience” every single day. Even Broetry and Slam work.
Take this post as a case. I would say this almost borders on being random. However, this is random only if you think of B2B as Boring-to-Boring. Gong’s audience laps it up.
That is all that matters.
Now compare this to the competition, Chorus.ai. Their content marketing leans towards conventional B2B content marketing tactics, providing data & rich insights. Post to post, their content “looks more useful” to the audience.
However...
Chorus has a lower average engagement rate per post compared to Gong based on a scan of the most recent 25 organic posts from the LinkedIn handles of both companies.
The big difference lies in how Gong uses social media.
It uses the channel to build an audience, to be top of their minds, and educate them by sharing value-building content wrapped in its unique, wacky tone. The latter builds significant recall.
These efforts have helped Gong carry a buzz that is usually reserved for larger brands.
Personify the brand
- Gong’s biggest differentiatorLet’s start with the name.
The word “Gong” in the world of sales conveys a desire, the sound of it something every salesperson aspires to hear several times in their career.
“Hitting the Gong” is a celebration of sweat, grime and great performance that went into closing a deal. The name encapsulates so many right emotions.
Brand personality - Unconventional, wacky, fun, irreverent, informal, and brutally honest. Who expects this from a B2B software product?
Elevate & reframe the discussion
– speak to a fundamental human painInstead of engaging in endless debates about whose proprietary AI is better, Gong talks about one of the most pressing problems for sales reps and leaders. The “uncertainty that salespeople have when they make a decision”.
Gong reframes the age-old “Gut Vs Data” dichotomy wonderfully well.
Now if you talk to sales leaders like I do as part of my current role, you’d know that they are used to and are proud of making gut-based decisions. The more senior the leader, the prouder they are in deploying their intuition.
So, if a brand were to tell them that using their gut is passé …ouch, you just hurt their ego.
What does Gong do?
It reframes the same dichotomy as “Opinion Vs Reality”.
Smart.
Gong has given its unique spin to the Virgin Marketing Playbook based on the context that it lives within.
Gong is a wonderful case study of how non-linear marketing could be your competitive advantage in a less- differentiated product category in B2B. It is also a wonderful testament to what a bold marketing leadership can achieve in such a short time frame.