Hello and welcome to another episode of Zoo. Today my good friend Courtney is joining me in the zoo, we are just going to share with me how business to business markets, specifically in the IT sphere has changed quite dramatically using the last few years. Thanks to the, I don't know if it's a change or an increase in the consumer market and see the world. It probably started with, I choose it probably was an iPhone thing, I don't know right now consumer marketing is key. Welcome to Zoo Courtney, it's so great to have you for your year. Yeah, hello, thanks all for happy to be here and always happy to talk about marketing, it's a pretty exciting time right now in marketing, everything's changing, it's changing every day, there's new technology, new approaches, I've been doing marketing for about 20 years now and I'd say that I really first saw the influence of B to C marketing on B to B marketing in about, it was probably around 2002 and I was working for a portal software company and it was all about collaboration and I remember at the time working with product marketing and trying to define for the world what a blog was. Nobody knew what a blog was, what was a discussion board, right, what was a forum and how could people collaborate better and share knowledge, knowledge was a big word at the time and I'm only laughing because it's the same struggle today so yeah. Yeah, I mean we're still blogging, you know blogs, you know people still create newsletters today that are based on blogs and not sending them out through email, I mean it's still happening today and things I think have just gotten better since then, there are more tools, there are more people participating, they can, more people can participate at any time of the day and so you know with more people having mobile devices, more people having internet access, more people understanding the tools, you know as marketers we now have all of these channels to leverage to reach not only businesses but real people. What was it that made us take a closer look at some of those tools because they were there for a while, it wasn't just overnight discovered on the consumer side, is it that the consumer marketing side had a bit of results and the business side needed innovation to drive us up or was it that this is how we communicate with the moral culture issue? Good question, I think I mean I think it started off with some techy people that just really enjoyed the technology but it's probably a little bit of the consumerization of IT that we're talking about today where you know if you're at home and you know a long time ago when Flickr started you'd be posting your photos on Flickr and you know then you go to work and you expect your experience at work to be somewhat similar so I think you know in the early days of consumerization we as marketers felt that that we wanted to bring all these cool tools and gadgets and ways of collaborating into the workforce and actually incorporate them into our products if we were on the technical side and really help our customers leverage all of that new technology that is supposed to you know make it easier to get things done, make it easier to live your life to you know do business all of the things that technology is good at and I think B2C was just you know faster to the game than B2B and so B2B got all these great ideas from B2C and adopted them for marketing and for their lifestyle at work. So we're inserting ourselves closer into their lives because they are inserting technology closer into their lives right? Yeah yeah I was at a SEMA event meeting yesterday so that's an association for event marketers and they were talking about how customer experience is and your experience with your customers and their satisfaction is really your only differentiator today. Customers can make changes at the drop of a hat they can change vendors really quickly they have a lot more choice than ever before so one of your differentiators has to be customer experience and there's a lot of B2C have those types of companies have this great understanding of customer experience. One of the speakers there was from Disney and if you want to think about customer experience you know they they're marketing to babies with you know baby Mickey Mouse and then they're marketing to adults with movies like up and you know just their whole life can be part of this Disney experience from you know buying the toys from going to the amusement parks watching the movies so customer experience and B2B companies having a great you know having a lot to learn in that area from improving customer experience and customer satisfaction you know there's just a lot a lot of best practices that can be taken from from the B2C world. That's great. Well thank you so much Courtney we're going to do more of these short little clips around IT marketing because I think there's inside the do carry is very very valuable whether your market here not to understand how the how our world is changing so I really appreciate you taking time coming into the zoo. Sure thank you all see you again. See you and for us to you take care be safe bye.