B2B marketing can often lacks distinctiveness. On a project for a big insurance company we names this issue “the sea of blue”: every brand used the same colour and also similar imagery (e.g. busy, happy teams of people collaborating in flashy offices). But selling sameness isn’t a smart strategy your spend is 1/10 that of the leading brand.
Work.Life faced this challenge in the co-working market, as Will Poskett of agency Defiant explained on Linked In (1). By creating and delivering a distinctive positioning, the brand grew spontaneous awareness +200% in two years and became the fastest growing brand in the category.
In this post we look at how they pulled it off and what challenger brands in B2b but also B2C can learn from their approach.
1. DEFINE A CLEAR, INSIGHT-LED POSITIONING
Most co-working brands paint the same rosy picture: happy freelancers, latte art, and community vibes. But simply matching the usual co-working clichés wasn’t going to cut it for Work.Life, so they took a different route. Instead of turning up the positivity, they tackled the pain points—the bits of work life we all love to hate.
The Work.Life team and Defiant tapped into insights about the emotional friction of modern working life: the small stresses, admin headaches and clunky systems that make “flexible working” anything but. And from that insight came a new positioning:
“We remove the hard work from working happy.”
2. DEVELOP A DISTINCTIVE MIX
The brand positioning inspired and guided creation of a highly distinctive mix. Bold, colourful cartoon characters and a tongue-in-cheek tone stood out in the sea of sameness (see below). “Ditch offices dirtier than you thoughts,” is an example of one headline!
Importantly, the campaign didn’t rely only on emotional “sizzle”. It also had some product “sausage”: functional benefits built on product truths. “The campaign always ties back to a real truth about the brand: our mission has always been to make people’s work lives happier,” explained Emma Baldwin, Senior Marketing Managed, in an interview with Pretty Little Marketer (PLM) (2).
3. Create Service Signatures
The best form of advertising for any brand is to “bake the brand in” to the actual product. For service brands, we work on helping develop what we call “service signatures”. These are distinctive service features that bring to life the brand at key moments.
“We show up every day with a genuine drive to make people’s work lives a bit better,” Emma told PLM in her interview. “It’s little, thoughtful moments that help build a happier work life”.
Examples of service features include:
- Removing “friction” in the day-to-day process e.g. sorting invoices quickly)
- Nice gestures from Work.Life team members e.g. “making someone a matcha latte after a tough pitch”
- Community events to help people unwind and have a fun.
3. Tap into cultural moments to cut through
One of Work.Life’s secret weapons has been its ability to tap into popular culture to boost impact. The brand has used cultural moments as a springboard for fast, funny and on-brand creativity.
For example, during the London Marathon, they held up a poster with the slogan “Running late to work counts as cardio, right?”. And for Valentine’s Day they ran posters offering “Single hot desks in your area.”
Emma explained in the PLM interview the 2-pronged approach used for these campaigns (2):
- Work upfront to identify key moments the team know will happen and that they want to activate
- Keeping the finger on the pulse of what else is going during the cultural moment on and developing creative to jump on the it
In conclusion, Work.Life is a brilliant example of distinctive, brand-led B2B marketing: start with a human truth, deliver both sausage & sizzle and drive distinctiveness across every touchpoint. They show that you don’t need the biggest budget to make the biggest impact—what you do need a strong idea, executed brilliantly and boldly.
