Consumer branding gets all the glory.

Most winners of the Cannes Lions and other marketing and advertising awards are brands that sell to consumers.

[source: Forbes] While business to business (B2B) branding has a reputation for being boring, more companies are taking creative cues from business to consumer branding (B2C). The fact is, we can no longer afford for our marketing to be boring. The buttoned-up, “just the facts” corporate tone associated with B2B isn’t effective anymore. As a result, marketers get to have a little more fun, and here’s why we need to.

The business world has changed.

Two decades ago, a B2B brand might have done well to play it safe. But as workplace cultures evolve and millennials constitute the majority of the workforce, B2B branding and marketing strategies must evolve too. Messages that once seemed professional now feel outdated.

The last thing you want is to be out of touch with your target audiences: people researching B2B products for their companies. Even by 2014, nearly half of the customers trying to find you were millennials. This generation has grown up online, freely sharing details of their lives, and shaping work environments that welcome casual dress, pets and telecommuting. This is the context in which your messages are heard — or not.

Marketing is evolving.

B2C and B2B customers today want to try before they buy, giving rise to experiential marketing, such as GE’s award-winning B2B Healthymagination campaign, educating industry professionals about its global healthcare initiative. Letting audiences see, hear, smell, taste and touch what you offer is no longer a nice-to-have — customers expect it.

If customers can’t experience your brand and product in person, they want engaging mobile sites/apps, games, simulations, social campaigns and in-depth reviews. Today, you can experiment with makeup and try on eyeglasses without leaving home. Additionally, customer reviews have always been important for making purchasing decisions, so it makes sense that reviews and testimonials are also essential for B2B. Five years ago, this was special. Now, it’s table stakes.

Just because your revenue comes from businesses and not individuals doesn’t mean you can afford to be overshadowed by B2C brands. Depending on which source you believe, it’s reported that most people are exposed to somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 brand messages a day. And, while your products aren’t competing with B2C brands, consumers’ attention and recall are finite.

Messages and marketing claims aren’t enough. The majority of B2B researchers you want to make an impression on — millennials — are run by the same people who spend hours each week watching online videos. To even be noticed, let alone stand out, B2B marketing must be sophisticated and multichannel.

You likely have multiple, nuanced audiences.

One-size-fits-all marketing fits no one. Your audience isn’t a monolith, so your brand shouldn’t be either. Take time to understand the facets of your customers’ needs and tastes. At AppLovin, we’ve created a brand that mobile game developers can identify with. Many of our customers are indie developers or one-person shops. If we sounded too corporate, we wouldn’t resonate with them.

Simultaneously, we have enterprise clients that expect markers of experience and professionalism. So, while we like to have fun with our branding and marketing, we’re not flip or crass. Even B2B customers need to see some aspect of themselves and their concerns in your brand, so pay close attention to what those are.

Creative risks tailored to your audiences can pay off.

When your brand strategy fits your target audiences, you have room to experiment with out-of-the-box campaigns. For example, MailChimp ran a year-long ad campaign for nine fake products whose names rhyme with MailChimp, inspired by a girl’s mispronunciation of MailChimp during the Serial podcast (“Mail Kimp,” anyone?). The products, which included “FailChips” and “SnailPrimp,” seemed random, but they were created to appeal to MailChimp’s small-to-midsize business subcultures. The campaign — in addition to being MailChimp’s most successful to date — actually won a Cyber Grand Prix trophy at Cannes.

HP’s “The Wolf” campaign, starring Christian Slater, made printer security interesting by personifying the threat network devices face. With a script that poked fun at both the potentially boring topic and stereotypical office culture, the video related an invisible problem in concrete terms. Perhaps riskiest was the video’s length — more than six minutes — but it worked and resonated with audiences who watched it all the way through.

Your contacts need to sell you internally.

You need B2B researchers to find, engage with and trust your brand, but they’re usually not the purchasing decision makers. They may believe in your products, but if they can’t get their teams on board, you’re out of luck. The more appealing, informative and flexible your marketing, the more easily those researchers can market you.

As Reid Tatoris, VP of product outreach and marketing at Distil Networks, said in an article: “One of our biggest B2B challenges is the number of decision makers who need to weigh in on the purchase decision. You really need to be able to tell your story several different ways to several different buyers in the prospect company.”

Your customers are people.

You aren’t selling to a building or to an LLC. You’re selling to a human being who works there. Forgetting this means missing opportunities to make personal, relevant connections that characterize the most effective marketing. You might be surprised to learn that, according to Google, “On average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers.” B2B brands that make emotional connections with customers have double the impact of marketing conveying functional value. Further, 86% of B2B buyers see “no real difference between suppliers,” meaning your brand needs to stand out.

B2B marketing has traditionally relied on facts and information, but they rarely make a lasting impression. To pave the way for a successful future, you need more than data; you need stories. Take inspiration from B2C marketing, but beyond that, as an individual who probably loves to hear and tell stories, notice what captures your attention. They are what last.