NBA fans who spent more than one million hours pouring over basketball stats can thank enterprise software company SAP. As the 2018 NBA Finals get underway between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors, fans will once again be checking stats on NBA.com/stats. Powered by SAP software, the site can pull from 71 years of history and crunch more than 4.5 quadrillion combinations of statistics to find the answer to almost any question.
Few people think of SAP when they’re analyzing players for points, rebounds and assists. But SAP’s Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Tillman and Chief Executive Bill McDermott would like to change that. I recently had an hour-long conversation with Tillman about how the company is using an age-old communication tool to support McDermott’s ambition to make SAP a top 10 global brand (it’s currently No. 21 on Interbrand’s ranking of global brands).
The challenge SAP faces is common to other B2B companies which make products that go largely unseen. How do you make the product visible? How do you sell the benefit of a product that many people use, but don’t know it? The answer lies in an ancient and remarkably effective communication tool that is at the heart of SAP’s new marketing strategy. The tool is storytelling.
Since taking the role of CMO of SAP nine months ago, Tillman has committed herself to recreating SAP’s brand narrative. Tillman’s first step to reinventing the way SAP tells its story was to look back 45 years to the day SAP was founded. Five former IBM executives had a vision to build the world’s leading enterprise applications company. They did pretty well. Today, SAP has a market cap of $130 billion and 370,000 customers in 180 countries.
In her research, Tillman re-discovered the company’s roots. “We were founded with a purpose to help the world run better and improve people’s lives, and to do that with technology,” Tillman says. Instead of focusing on messages that touted “efficiencies and optimization” as SAP had done in the past, Tillman decided to tell those stories of how SAP supports businesses, the economy, the environment and drives societal change. “I started to build a narrative for SAP that is entirely reflective of our purpose,” Tillman told me.
Last month, SAP launched a global marketing campaign. The “Best Run” campaign includes print ads, digital assets, social media experiences and television commercials starring actor Clive Owen. SAP’s storytelling-based campaign provides a valuable lesson for business leaders in any industry. The lesson: Your customers don’t care about your technology; they care about themselves. Show them how your product will improve their lives and you’ll earn their loyalty.
The new SAP stories are presented in the following template: Headline-Problem-Solution. It’s a simple, effective formula for telling customer stories. Here are three examples from the SAP website:
Smarter earthquake safety
In earthquake-prone Japan, a manufacturing company is working to improve seismic monitoring and protect citizens. Smart phones and SAP technology are the key.
Transforming elephant and rhino conservation
Poaching of elephants and rhinos is at an all-time high in South Africa. See how a forward-looking nonprofit partnered with SAP to tackle this complicated problem from all sides.
Saving every last drop
Water scarcity is creating the worst-ever crisis conditions across much of India. A pioneering manufacturer joined forces with SAP to confront this potential national disaster.
The top 10 global brands include household names such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Mercedes. These are companies that consumers see, touch, drive and taste. If your brand’s product is hidden from a customer’s day-to-day experience, you need to get creative. Take a page from SAP’s marketing playbook to make your brand’s promise come alive.