I don’t know about you, but I find the vast majority of B2B marketing to be absolutely dreadful. Over and over again, I’ve found business organizations that are scared to put anything even remotely “negative” into their marketing or sales content. Which leaves B2B messaging a vapid puffery of HAPPY! HAPPY! promises of sunshine and rainbows and miracle cures and ridiculous brand graphics.

The disconnect though, is that nobody buys it. Everyone lives in the real world and isn’t stupid. B2B customers immediately understand when pitches are avoiding messy reality. Brands might want to live in a delirious vacuum, but their customers sure don’t.

I find this perplexing, since so many people I know hold Apple up to be the gold standard of marketing. But they seem to forget that Steve Jobs, arguably the greatest pitchman of all time, started 4 of the most legendary product introductions ever by pointedly critiquing the status quo:
– In launching the iPod, Jobs called out the cost per song in incumbent CD and early flash players.
– In launching the iPhone, Jobs called out the incumbent design approaches of Moto, BlackBerry, Palm and Nokia’s physical keyboards.
– In launching the MacBook Air, he took to task the best-in-class product at the time, a Sony laptop and detailed all the ways it could be dramatically improved.
– In launching the iPad, he even critiqued his own Apple products, demonstrating a functionality gap between the iPhone and MacBook ranges.

Jobs did it with nothing but straightforward, earnest facts, but the end result was a devasting critique of those incumbent solutions. He was never petty, never vicious, never spouting baseless, snide criticism. And he did it with slides that were often nothing more than a single image on a blank background.
(Jobs was so effective at the art of critique, that the simple slide of the 4 smart phones – far and away the market leaders at the time – became one of the most infamous “perp walks” in design history!)

To me, there is a subtle difference in meaning between criticism and critique:
– Criticism: The expression of disapproval of someone or something on the basis of perceived faults or mistakes
– Critique: A detailed analysis and assessment of something, with the goal of improvement

Students in design programs are trained in the process of critique. You have to stand in front of your professors and fellow students, present your work and listen to the constructive feedback they give. The worst professors needlessly spout bitter criticism. The worst students hear critique as only criticism, as negative attacks on their brilliant work. The best understand that a good critique is the only way to improve.

Marketing and sales communications teams desperately need to take a page from Jobs and add the fine art of critique to their repertoire.

Videos of the keynotes below: